Volume 9 Issue 8, August 2008

When an animal moves, it must distinguish between sensory inputs caused by its own movement and those caused by another agent. Sommer and Crapse review how corollary discharge, neural signals that travel from the motor to the sensory structures, enable the coordination of movements and sensory analyses across a wide range of species.

Many animals use their whiskers to collect information about the environment. Diamond and colleagues explain how the brain creates a neuronal representation of the location and identity of objects from sensory signals and argue that this involves integration of knowledge about the self-generated whisker motion.

Conflicting findings from neuroimaging and patient-lesion studies have led to confusion regarding the parietal cortex's contribution to episodic memory. Cabeza and colleagues evaluate the hypotheses that have been put forward to explain these findings and discuss their attention-based hypothesis.

As a dynamical disorder, epilepsy is an attractive target for computer modelling. Here, Lytton provides an overview of the different types of computer model that have been used to describe epilepsy and shows how they can provide new insights into the disorder.

Antidepressant treatments are often selected on a trial-and-error basis, resulting in limited average treatment efficacy. Florian Holsboer argues that combining pharmacogenetic data with biomarkers identified using genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, neuroimaging and neuroendocrinological studies might lead to personalized antidepressant medications with superior efficacy and fewer adverse effects.

Psychologists have long known that human cognition and behaviour vary across cultures. Han and Northoff review recent neuroimaging studies which show that one's cultural background also influences the neural activity that underlies cognitive functions.