Thymus capitatus represents 1 of the 5 Tunisian species of the genus Thymus, which has long‐standing use for flavouring and preserving several food products. Its constituents have been reported to endow antimicrobial properties, but little is known about their antiviral activities. The aim of this study was to examine the antiviral activity of pure compounds from the most bioactive inhibitory T. capitatus extract in vitro against herpes simplex virus Type 2 (HSV‐2) infection and to identify their mechanism of action. Either the extracts or the essential oil exert inhibitory activity against HSV‐2 infection, with the ethanolic extract showing the lowest EC50 value (2.3 μg/ml). Three pure compounds were then isolated from the ethanolic extract and investigated for their antiviral activity. β‐sitosterol showed the most favourable selectivity index and both cinnamaldehyde and carvacrol exerted moderate antiviral effect. Investigation of the mechanism of action revealed that all three compounds directly inactivated the infectivity of the virus particles. These findings suggest the use of T. capitatus ethanolic extract as source of anti‐HSV‐2 pure compounds and warrant further studies to evaluate their therapeutic potential.

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The endeavor of the present study is to gauge the time course of connecting incoming information to information mentioned earlier in the text that are no longer available in Working Memory (WM). Two word-byword self-paced reading experiments based on the contradiction paradigm were used. The Group Embedded Figure Test (GEFT) was utilized to explore participants' field-dependency. Data from 96 Tunisians reveals that reading times in the inconsistent condition were higher than the consistent condition in the post-critic region when participants were instructed to adopt the protagonist point of view. However, this difference did not reach the significance level when participants were instructed to read for mere comprehension. The results also reveal that reading times for field-dependent participants were higher than their field-independent counterparts. Thus, this study yields evidence for the dominance of local coherence over global coherence.