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Mashup Score: 0This Week in The Journal - 20 hour(s) ago
### Considering Our Impact on Others May Be Reward Based Alexander Soutschek, Christopher Burke, Pyungwon Kang, Nuri Wieland, Nick Netzer, and Philippe Tobler (see article e2376232024) When we make decisions that impact others, we consider the options available and select ones that will provide optimal benefit to them. This happens on a broad scale, from getting a gift for a friend to deciding which politician to elect for the betterment of society. In this issue, Soutschek et al. investigated how our brains compare conflicting options for the mutual benefit of all. After fasting for 4 h, human participants completed tasks in which they rated how …
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Mashup Score: 35Trying harder: how cognitive effort sculpts neural representations during working memory - 3 day(s) ago
While the exertion of mental effort improves performance on cognitive tasks, the neural mechanisms by which motivational factors impact cognition remain unknown. Here, we used fMRI to test how changes in cognitive effort, induced by changes in task difficulty, impacts neural representations of working memory. Participants (both sexes) were precued whether working memory difficulty would be hard or easy. We hypothesized that hard trials demanded more effort as a later decision required finer mnemonic precision. Behaviorally, pupil size was larger and response times were slower on hard compared to easy trials suggesting our manipulation of effort succeeded. Neurally, we observed robust persistent activity during delay periods in prefrontal cortex, especially during hard trials. Yet, details of the memoranda could not be decoded from patterns in prefrontal activity. In the patterns of activity in visual cortex, however, we found strong decoding of memorized targets, where accuracy was hig
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Mashup Score: 4Structural connectivity between olfactory tubercle and ventrolateral periaqueductal gray implicated in human feeding behavior - 7 day(s) ago
The olfactory tubercle (TUB), also called the tubular striatum, receives direct input from the olfactory bulb, and along with the nucleus accumbens, is one of the two principal components of the ventral striatum. As a key component of the reward system, the ventral striatum is involved in feeding behavior, but the vast majority of research on this structure has focused on the nucleus accumbens, leaving the TUB’s role in feeding behavior understudied. Given the importance of olfaction in food seeking and consumption, olfactory input to the striatum should be an important contributor to motivated feeding behavior. Yet the TUB is vastly understudied in humans, with very little understanding of its structural organization and connectivity. In this study, we analyzed macrostructural variations between the TUB and the whole brain, and explored the relationship between TUB structural pathways and feeding behavior, using body mass index (BMI) as a proxy in females and males. We identified a un
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Mashup Score: 0This Week in The Journal - 8 day(s) ago
Graham H. Davis, Aprem Zaya, and Margaret M. Panning Pearce (see article e1256232024) Diseases characterized by neuron death, such as Huntington’s disease (HD), are strongly associated with the buildup of misfolded proteins into amyloids. How amyloid aggregation leads to the loss of neurons remains unclear, but there is strong support for altered phagocytic glial cell activity promoting inflammation and the buildup and spread of amyloids. This has led to further investigation into how glial cells are altered in neurodegenerative disease states, with the end goal of understanding whether they …
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Mashup Score: 5Maintenance of Procedural Motor Memory across Brief Rest Periods Requires the Hippocampus - 9 day(s) ago
Research on the role of the hippocampus in memory acquisition has generally focused on active learning. But to understand memory, it is at least as important to understand processes that happen offline, during both wake and sleep. In a study of patients with amnesia, we previously demonstrated that although a functional hippocampus is not necessary for the acquisition of procedural motor memory during training session, it is required for its offline consolidation during sleep. Here, we investigated whether an intact hippocampus is also required for the offline consolidation of procedural motor memory while awake. Patients with amnesia due to hippocampal damage ( n = 4, all male) and demographically matched controls ( n = 10, 8 males) trained on the finger tapping motor sequence task. Learning was measured as gains in typing speed and was divided into online (during task execution) and offline (during interleaved 30 s breaks) components. Amnesic patients and controls showed comparable
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#JNeurosci: As a continuation of prior research, Mylonas @manoach_d et al. compared patients w/ amnesia from hippocampal damage to healthy peers, showing the hippocampus is essential for offline motor learning, during both wakeful rest & sleep. @LabManoach https://t.co/TYSlhZcfEX https://t.co/MUQCee3205
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Mashup Score: 9The Time-Course of Food Representation in the Human Brain - 10 day(s) ago
Humans make decisions about food every day. The visual system provides important information that forms a basis for these food decisions. Although previous research has focused on visual object and category representations in the brain, it is still unclear how visually presented food is encoded by the brain. Here, we investigate the time-course of food representations in the brain. We used time-resolved multivariate analyses of electroencephalography (EEG) data, obtained from human participants (both sexes), to determine which food features are represented in the brain, and whether focused attention is needed for this. We recorded EEG while participants engaged in one of two tasks. In one task the stimuli were task relevant, whereas in the other task the stimuli were not task relevant. Our findings indicate that the brain can differentiate between food and non-food items from approximately 112 milliseconds after stimulus onset. The neural signal at later latencies contained information
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Mashup Score: 0Hostile Attribution Bias Shapes Neural Synchrony in the Left Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex during Ambiguous Social Narratives - 10 day(s) ago
Hostile attribution bias refers to the tendency to interpret social situations as intentionally hostile. While previous research has focused on its developmental origins and behavioral consequences, the underlying neural mechanisms remain underexplored. Here, we employed functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the neural correlates of hostile attribution bias. While undergoing fNIRS, male and female participants listened to and provided attribution ratings for 21 hypothetical scenarios where a character’s actions resulted in a negative outcome for the listener. Ratings of hostile intentions were averaged to measure hostile attribution bias. Using intersubject representational similarity analysis, we found that participants with similar levels of hostile attribution bias exhibited higher levels of neural synchrony during narrative listening, suggesting shared interpretations of the scenarios. This effect was localized to the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPF
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Mashup Score: 5Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors within Cells: Temporal Resolution in Cytoplasm, Endoplasmic Reticulum, and Membrane - 13 day(s) ago
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the most prescribed treatment for individuals experiencing major depressive disorder. The therapeutic mechanisms that take place before, during, or after SSRIs bind the serotonin transporter (SERT) are poorly understood, partially because no studies exist on the cellular and subcellular pharmacokinetic properties of SSRIs in living cells. We studied escitalopram and fluoxetine using new intensity-based, drug-sensing fluorescent reporters targeted to the plasma membrane, cytoplasm, or endoplasmic reticulum (ER) of cultured neurons and mammalian cell lines. We also used chemical detection of drug within cells and phospholipid membranes. The drugs attain equilibrium in neuronal cytoplasm and ER at approximately the same concentration as the externally applied solution, with time constants of a few s (escitalopram) or 200–300 s (fluoxetine). Simultaneously, the drugs accumulate within lipid membranes by ≥18-fold (escitalopram) or 180-fold
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Mashup Score: 22The Intellectual Disability Risk Gene Kdm5b Regulates Long-Term Memory Consolidation in the Hippocampus - 15 day(s) ago
The histone lysine demethylase KDM5B is implicated in recessive intellectual disability disorders, and heterozygous, protein-truncating variants in KDM5B are associated with reduced cognitive function in the population. The KDM5 family of lysine demethylases has developmental and homeostatic functions in the brain, some of which appear to be independent of lysine demethylase activity. To determine the functions of KDM5B in hippocampus-dependent learning and memory, we first studied male and female mice homozygous for a Kdm5b Δ ARID allele that lacks demethylase activity. Kdm5b Δ ARID/ Δ ARID mice exhibited hyperactivity and long-term memory deficits in hippocampus-dependent learning tasks. The expression of immediate early, activity-dependent genes was downregulated in these mice and hyperactivated upon a learning stimulus compared with wild-type (WT) mice. A number of other learning-associated genes were also significantly dysregulated in the Kdm5b Δ ARID/ Δ ARID hippocampus. Next, we
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Mashup Score: 2This Week in The Journal - 15 day(s) ago
Siyu Chen, Rachel M. Rahn, Annie R. Bice, Seana H. Bice, Jonah A. Padawar-Curry et al. (see article e1019232024) During the visual critical period, visual circuits are more plastic and adapt their connections in response to sensory stimulation from the environment. When vision is impaired in one eye during this time, also known as monocular deprivation (MD), the excitability of neurons in the visual cortex changes. But how the resting-state functional connectivity to cortical circuits beyond the visual cortex is …
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This Week in The Journal #JNeurosci | Considering Our Impact on Others May Be Reward Based; A New Mechanism in the PVN for Sympathetic Activation and Hypertension https://t.co/MRweJO4oY1