Our study shows the feasibility and beneficial effects of transcutaneous nerve stimulation in the left auditory canal of healthy subjects. Brain activation patterns clearly share features with changes observed during invasive vagus nerve stimulation.

No abstract

Long-term serial position effects were found in the delayed free recall of word pairs whose presentations were separated by distractor activity. The long-term primacy effect was reduced by manipulations discouraging cumulative rehearsal of the first few pairs, such as increasing the difficulty of the distractor task in the interpair interval (Experiment 1) and incidental learning instructions (Experiment 2). The long-term recency effect was not changed by either of these manipulations. It was also unaffected by the difficulty of the distractor task in the retention interval. All of these results are inconsistent with a short-term store interpretation of the long-term recency effect. Recency was found to be positively correlated with the ratio of the length of the interpair interval to the length of the retention interval. Based on these results, it is hypothesized that the primacy effect is due to extra processing given to the first few items, and recency is due to a retrieval strategy that relies on contextual-temporal cues available at the recall test. This hypothesis was tested and its predictions confirmed in Experiment 4.

Adaptations in maternal systemic immunity are presumed to be responsible for observed alterations in disease susceptibility and severity as pregnancy progresses. Epidemiological evidence as well as animal studies have shown that influenza infections are more severe during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, resulting in greater morbidity and mortality, although the reason for this is still unclear. Our laboratory has taken advantage of 20 years of experience studying the murine immune response to respiratory viruses to address questions of altered immunity during pregnancy. With clinical studies and unique animal model systems, we are working to define the mechanisms responsible for altered immune responses to influenza infection during pregnancy and what roles hormones such as estrogen or progesterone play in these alterations.

These data show that pregnancy is not a period of immunosuppression but an alteration in immune priorities characterized by a strengthening of innate immune barriers and a concomitant reduction in adaptive/inflammatory immunity in the later stages of pregnancy.