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By eliciting a natural exploratory behavior in rats, head scanning, a study reveals that hippocampal place cells form new, stable firing fields in those locations where the behavior has just occurred.
A study finds that the loss of phasic dopamine signal in ventral, but not dorsal, striatum predicts escalation of cocaine self-administration. We discuss the study's implications for addiction theory and treatment.
A simple cued-approach training procedure can bias economic choices toward specific goods. It appears to work by drawing overt attention toward trained items, scaling up their judged value.
A study now shows that granule cells deep in the olfactory bulb exhibit wildly different response dynamics depending on behavioral state, suggesting they could configure network changes across behavioral states.
A finding now suggests that the brain's response to heartbeats is influential in guiding reported visual experience, such that the ability to accurately report the presence or absence of a visual target is influenced by the brain's heartbeat-evoked activity.
The internal dynamics of recurrent cortical circuits is crucial to brain function. We now learn that simply increasing the strengths of recurrent connections shifts neural dynamics to a potentially powerful computational regime.
CNS white matter injury may cause sustained demyelination despite the persistence of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs). A study suggests that dysregulated Wnt signaling disrupts self-renewal to yield OPC maturation arrest.
Feeding effects of CB1 receptors are commonly associated with exogenous cannabinoids, but a study now identifies a circuit by which endocannabinoid activation of CB1 receptors in the main olfactory bulb regulates normal food intake.
A study shows the transience of early visual representations (while the stimulus is still on) and the persistence of higher representations (outlasting the stimulus) as various categorical distinctions emerge at staggered latencies. Rather than slavishly following the stimulus, representations interact through recurrent signals to infer what's there.
A study now suggests that tau-induced reactive oxygen species relax chromatin, which leads to expression of PIWIL1, cell cycle reentry and neurodegeneration.
A study finds that, during movement preparation, when motor cortex is active, but elicits no muscle output, firing of individual neurons in dorsal premotor and primary motor cortex cancels out at the level of population activity.
A study demonstrates that variability in how people perform a movement can predict the rate of motor learning on an individual basis. This suggests that motor 'noise' is a central component of motor learning.
Although projections from the insect antennal lobe to the mushroom body are probabilistic, those to the lateral horn are stereotyped, suggesting an interplay of preconfigured and plastic circuits in olfactory processing.
A study in this issue of Nature Neuroscience reports that administering caffeine to humans immediately after memory encoding enhances consolidation, as reflected by improved performance in a memory test a day later.
New findings in preclinical Alzheimer's disease patients and mouse models of the disease suggest that it is the lateral, rather than the medial, entorhinal cortex that is most susceptible to tau pathology early in Alzheimer's disease. Aberrations begin here and spread to other cortical sites.
