Several well described mechanisms of effector immune cell suppression in the head and neck cancer microenvironment are discussed here, along with updates on current trials designed to translate what we have learned from pre-clinical and correlative clinical studies into improved responses in patients with head and neck cancer following immune activating therapies.
A number of recent studies have shown that currently rewarded items guide attention (Hickey, Chelazzi, & Theeuwes, 2010a, 2010b, 2011), or that items that were rewarded in the past can continue to have attention-attracting power, even if they are no longer rewarded on current trials (Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011).
Such a small difference is unlikely on the basis of current trial evidence of differences in lymphoedema and arm symptoms, including the NSABP-32 (5% difference in patient-reported moderate severe arm swelling at 36 months, Land et al, 2010) and the ALMANAC trial (7% difference in the proportion of patients reporting substantial arm swelling at 18 months, Fleissig et al, 2005).
The effect of current trial congruency on midfrontal theta clearly dropped to zero before and after the response.
The primary factor was the Correctness of the Previous Trial, and secondary factors were Stimulus Type (i.e., Word vs. Nonword) on the Current Trial, Word Frequency on the Current Trial, and Stimulus Type on the Previous Trial.
The critical comparison is between 'switch' trials (where the task on the current trial differs from that on the previous trial) and 'stay' trials (where the task remains the same).
This was changed from trial to trial and prevented participants from making judgments relative to the initial pointer orientation on the current trial and/or the final pointer orientation on the previous trial.
Hickey et al. (2010a) concluded that a color associated with high reward on the previous trial automatically captured attention on the current trial, an effect that could not be modulated by top-down strategy (see also Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011a, 2011b).
RT data Observers were significantly faster when the target color on the current trial was identical to the target color on the previous trial (675 ms) than when the target color on the current trial was different from the target color on the previous trial (739 ms), F 1, 9) = 31.7, p <.001.
