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The phasic dopamine response is traditionally thought to signal reward prediction errors. Redgrave and Gurney evaluate evidence from studies of basal ganglia circuitry and signal timing, and propose instead that the short-latency dopamine signal is important for discovering novel actions.
The gustatory system is crucial for detecting and discriminating between foods and selecting nutritious diets. Simon and colleagues now propose that this system achieves its complex tasks through distributed neural codes that represent the sensory and postingestive properties of tastants.
An enormous expansion in cortical surface area was crucial for the evolution of the primate gyrencephalic cortex. Kriegstein and colleagues evaluate models of progenitor cell division that might underlie cortical expansion during development and provide an insight into this evolutionary step.
Using schizophrenia as an example, Meyer-Lindenberg and Weinberger review the effectiveness of the intermediate phenotype concept for characterizing the neural systems affected by risk gene variants, with a view to elucidating mechanistic aspects of brain function implicated in psychiatric disease.
Although potential therapeutic strategies for spinal cord injury are emerging, the mechanisms underlying functional recovery are unclear. Recent work emphasizes the contribution of axon regeneration and plasticity, yet their involvement, and that of less well-explored processes, remains to be established.
In mental health, the perennial debate about nature versus nurture is giving way to an appreciation that nature and nurture work together. Caspi and Moffitt discuss the opportunities and challenges in the collaboration between psychiatry, epidemiology and neuroscience, and our understanding of gene-environment interactions.
Long-term memory formation is associated with bidirectional changes in synaptic strength that require enhanced protein synthesis. Govindarajan, Kelleher and Tonegawa describe a model by which translation-dependent plasticity at synapses that are clustered in a dendritic branch facilitates the formation of long-term memory engrams.
Uchida and colleagues consider integration of information for perceptual decision making, focusing on olfactory and visual systems. They argue that there are neural mechanisms that construct discrete sensory samples from a continuous input stream to facilitate important computational functions.
Transplantation of neural stem cells holds great promise for treating neurological disorders. Martino and Pluchino argue that neural stem cells achieve their therapeutic efficacy exculsively by a cell-replacement mechanism, rather than by the recently proposed alternative mechanism of bystander neuroprotection.
Data sharing in neuroscience remains relatively rare. Ascoli describes the obstacles that need to be overcome, and highlights the great potential for sharing neuronal morphology data as a starting point to mobilize data sharing in the wider neuroscience community.
Emotional body language is a rapidly emerging research field in cognitive neuroscience. de Gelder reviews the body's role in our understanding of emotion, action and communication, and discusses similarities in the neuroanatomy and temporal dynamics between face and body perception.
Feldman and Del Negro consider recent evidence for two distinct respiratory rhythm generators – the preBötzinger Complex and the retrotrapezoid nucleus/parafacial respiratory group – and underscore the importance of intrinsically rhythmic pacemaker neurons that drive rhythm generation.
The left hemisphere is traditionally thought to be dominant for motor control. However, Serrien and colleagues highlight specialized functions for the right hemisphere and dynamic cross-hemispheric interactions in action processing, particularly emphasizing task- and performer-related demands and time scales.
Markram describes the impressive aims of the Blue Brain Project, in which the enormous computing power of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer is being harnessed to build biologically accurate models of the neocortical column and, ultimately, the whole brain.
There has been considerable speculation about the possibilities of exploiting neural stem cells as delivery vehicles in gene therapy. Müller, Snyder and Loring discuss the potential applications of this approach and obstacles to the clinical development of such strategies.