Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
Flexible decision-making strategies (such as planning) are a key component of adaptive behavior, yet their neural mechanisms have remained resistant to experimental analysis. Theories of planning require prediction and evaluation of potential future rewards, suggesting that reward signals may covertly appear at decision points. To test this idea, w...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
In order to determine brain and behavioral sensitivity of nutrients that may serve as inductive signals during early development, we altered choline availability to rats during 7 time frames spanning embryonic day (ED) 6 through postnatal day (PD) 75 and examined spatial memory ability in the perinatally-treated adults. Two sensitive periods were i...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
The aim of this study was to investigate intra-regional activation and inter-regional connectivity during passive movement. During fMRI, a mechanic device was used to move the subject's index and middle fingers. We assessed four movement conditions (unimanual left/right, bimanual symmetric/asymmetric), plus Rest. A conventional intra-regional analy...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
Sensory discrimination requires distributed arrays of processing units. In the olfactory bulb, the processing units for odor discrimination are believed to involve dendrodendritic synaptic interactions between mitral and granule cells. There is increasing anatomical evidence that these cells are organized in columns, and that the columns processing...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
Adoptive transfer experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (AT-EAE) is an inflammatory demyelination that recapitulates in mouse spinal cord (SC) the human multiple sclerosis disease. We now analyze previously reported cDNA array data from age-matched young female adult control and passively myelin antigen-sensitized EAE mice with regard to organi...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
Both dorsal and ventral striatum are implicated in the "habitization" of behavior that occurs in addiction. Here we examined the effect of cocaine exposure on associative encoding in these two regions. Neural activity was recorded during go/no-go discrimination learning and reversal. Activity in ventral striatum developed and reversed rapidly, trac...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
Thalamocortical communication is a dynamic process influenced by both presynaptic and postsynaptic mechanisms. In this study, we recorded single-unit responses from cortical neurons that received direct input from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) to address the question of whether prior patterns of cortical activity affect the ability of LGN in...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
In four experiments we assessed the effect of systemic amphetamine on the ability of a stimulus paired with reward and a stimulus that was not paired with reward to support instrumental conditioning; i.e., we trained rats to press two levers, one followed by a stimulus that had been trained in a predictive relationship with a food outcome and the o...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
The brain has evolved the ability to integrate information across the senses in order to improve the detection and disambiguation of biologically significant events. This multisensory synthesis of information leads to faster (and more accurate) behavioral responses, yet the underlying neural mechanisms by which these responses are speeded are as ye...
Published in Frontiers in integrative neuroscience
In the absence of external stimuli, animals explore the environment by performing irregular movements, but the neuronal mechanisms underlying this arrhythmic motion are largely unknown. In this paper, we studied the relationship between the spontaneous neuronal activity in the leech (Hirudo medicinalis) and its behavior. We analyzed the electrical ...
