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A study reports that a metabolic measure of synaptic activity in the motor cortex becomes dissociated from neural firing rates after extensive practice in a behavioral task, suggesting an increase in efficacy of synaptic inputs.
Three studies in visual and auditory cortex show that intracortical excitatory inputs amplify incoming sensory signals, as their sensory tuning is closely matched to that arriving from the sensory thalamus.
A study shows that selective lesions of the orbital prefrontal cortex in macaques spare behavioral flexibility and emotional processing but impair a test of outcome expectation, suggesting that some psychiatric disorders ascribed to a disrupted orbital prefrontal cortex may instead be caused by more widespread dysfunction.
A feature of abusive alcohol drinking has been modeled successfully in experiments with rats. The experiments show that changes in NMDA signaling in specific neural circuits accompany the transition to aversion-resistant drinking.
A study now shows how brain-wide gain modulation, indexed by pupil diameter, shapes the structure of brain-wide neural interactions and, consequently, trial-and-error learning.
Chaotic networks produce rich temporal dynamics that could be useful for timing, but are extremely sensitive to perturbations. Work now shows that a learning rule for the weights of a chaotic recurrent network can stabilize time-varying activity patterns. This result can be used to train output units to produce generic timed responses.
Little is known about the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying acute and chronic itch. A new technique for silencing peripheral itch neurons defines two independent itch circuits that transmit signals to the CNS.
Chesi et al. use exome sequencing of trios consisting of subjects with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and their parents to find de novo variants in 25 genes, one of which is the chromatin regulator SS18L1 (CREST).
Modern theories of associative learning center on a prediction error. A study finds that artificial activation of dopamine neurons can substitute for missing reward prediction errors to rescue blocked learning.
A study shows that circadian glucocorticoid oscillations have dual roles in dendritic spine plasticity, controlling spine formation and elimination through distinct mechanisms important for motor learning.
Intrahippocampal transplantation of inhibitory interneuron progenitors derived from the medial ganglionic eminence markedly ameliorates the seizure activity and neurobehavioral deficits typically observed in the pilocarpine mouse model of mesial temporal lobe epilepsy, even if the cells are engrafted after the onset of spontaneous seizures.
A study reports that fixation and optomotor responses in Drosophila rely on parallel neural processing of position and motion information, but interact at the behavioral level.
Two studies in this issue report the discovery of different types of uncertainty signals in little-studied, but critical, regions of the forebrain: decision confidence in the pulvinar and reward risk in the anterodorsal septum.
Cognitive function declines as part of the normal aging process. A study finds that the dopamine-boosting drug L-DOPA changes value representation in the brain and improves reinforcement learning in older individuals.
A screen now identifies a protein that regulates degradation of mutant huntingtin, which causes Huntington's disease, and manipulations show that promoting clearance of the toxic protein itself may be sufficient to halt disease.
A study in this issue suggests that neuronal DNA double-strand breaks can result from natural behaviors. The breaks occur in the circuits that are activated and are enhanced in a model of Alzheimer's disease. The implications of this finding are far-reaching.
What makes certain individuals more vulnerable to drug abuse than others? A study finds that potentiation of glutamatergic inputs to nucleus accumbens indirect pathway neurons may protect against compulsive drug-seeking.
