One pending question in social neuroscience is whether interpersonal interactions are processed differently by the brain depending on the bodily characteristics of the interactor, i.e., their physical appearance. To address this issue, we engaged participants in a minimally interactive task with an avatar either showing bodily features or not while recording their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) in order to investigate indices of action observation and action monitoring processing. Multivariate results showed that bodily compared with nonbodily appearance modulated parieto-occipital neural patterns throughout the entire duration of the observed movement and that, importantly, such patterns differ from the ones related to initial shape processing. Furthermore, among the electrocortical indices of action monitoring, only the early observational positivity (oPe) was responsive to the bodily appearance of the observed agent under the specific task requirement to predict the partner movement. ...

We constantly exploit the statistical regularities in our environment to help guide our perception. For instance, hearing a particular jingle will prime our sensory systems for the sight (and taste!) of ice cream. But how does the brain acquire and expl...

We were interested in the role that attention might play in disordered thought processes frequent in schizophrenia. Specifically, we wanted to examine the role of reflexive and voluntary attentional processes in the semantic domain by using a category-switching technique based on Neely’s 1977 work with normal subjects. Experiment 1: We tested 20 schizophrenic patients (SzP) and 20 controls on a lexical decision task. Probe words were either from 1 of 2 possible categories (Animal or Body Part) or pronounceable nonwords. Prime stimuli were the words Animal, Body Part, or Neutral. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between prime and probe was either short (250 msec) or long (2000 msec). SzP and controls were told to expect words to mismatch; in other words, when Animal was the prime then a type of body part would follow as the probe, and vice versa. At short SOAs, SzP showed greater benefit than control subjects in reaction times to the probe when prime and probe words were related, indicating hyper-reflexi...

Stress is a common occurrence for military personnel. This can include the stress of deployment and active combat. Anxiety is considered a reaction to stress and with anxiety related disorders on the rise, it is imperative that stress be considered a pre-existing condition when studying a number of neurological conditions. To determine the effects of stress on the behavioral outcomes of traumatic brain injury (TBI), we used a 3-day acute unpredictable stress (AUS) model followed by blast induce neurotrauma (BINT) to assessed social anhedonia and anxiety-like behaviors in male and female rats. The animals were divided into 4 groups including an unstressed and uninjured control (Con), stress only animals (AUS), injury only animals (BINT), and animals that received both stress and injury (AUS+BINT). In the males, behavioral tests such as elevated plus and 3-chamber sociability showed that stress plays a dominant role in determining behavioral outcomes after TBI with the AUS+BINT animals behaving more similarl...

SfN Holds 17th Annual Capitol Hill Day SfN successfully completed their 17th annual Capitol Hill Day from March 6th through March 8th. It was once again transformed into a multiday, virtual event with 40 advocates in attendance holding 73 meetings with congressional offices across 27 states. These participants advocated for robust funding for the NIH, NSF, and the VA Medical and Prosthetic Research Program as well as support for the continued ethical use of animals in research. We want to thank everyone who participated in Hill Day and used their voice to advocate for neuroscience priorities!

Previously, [Almeida et al. (2008)][1] used a technique called Continuous Flash Suppression to show that human dorsal stream cortical areas specifically responded to a “tool category.” Here, we used the same technique to clarify what attributes of tools are processed in the dorsal stream. We examined surface attributes and shape. A significant priming effect was found when we removed surface attributes by using line drawings instead of photographs. In a second experiment, we manipulated shape and we found that there were no significant priming effects when we used nonelongated tool pictures as tool prime stimuli. To better clarify the effect of shape attributes on priming effects, we conducted a further experiment using elongated stick-like rectangles as prime stimuli and found that elongated shapes significantly shortened the reaction time to the tool pictures as target stimuli. Additionally, when elongated vegetables were used as prime stimuli, the reaction time to the tool pictures as target stimuli was...

The benefits of environmental enrichment (EE) for experimental animals include increased spine density, enhanced synaptic transmission and plasticity, and improved cognition. A prime molecular candidate underlying these positive effects is the enrichmen...

Savings memory is a phenomenon in which the molecular remnants of a “forgotten” memory are able to prime a neural system to re-express the memory following a reminder event (which alone is insufficient to induce a de novo memory). In the marine mollusk ...

Injuries to peripheral nerves are frequent, yet no drug therapies are available for effective nerve repair. The slow growth rate of axons and inadequate access to growth factors challenge natural repair of nerves. A better understanding of the molecules that can promote the rate of axon growth may reveal therapeutic opportunities. Molecular profiling of injured neurons at early intervals of injury, when regeneration is at the maximum, has been the gold standard for exploring growth promoters. A complementary in vitro regenerative priming model was recently shown to induce enhanced outgrowth in adult sensory neurons. In this work, we exploited the in vitro priming model to reveal novel candidates for adult nerve regeneration. We performed a whole-tissue proteomics analysis of the in vitro primed dorsal root ganglia (DRGs) from adult SD rats and compared their molecular profile with that of the in vivo primed, and control DRGs. The proteomics data generated are available via ProteomeXchange with identifier P...

The time needed to evaluate a target word as either affectively positive or negative is shorter when prime and target words are affectively congruent than that of word pairs that are affectively incongruent (e.g. positive-negative). This phenomenon is referred to as Affective Priming effect. Research on the affective priming effect has often utilized reaction time (RT) measures, which led to several competing theories. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the possible underlying neural mechanisms of the affective priming effect. Eighteen young native English-speakers (6 m, 12 f) participated in the study. Two sets of 720 prime-target pairs (240 affectively congruent, 240 incongruent, and 240 neutral) were selected which used either words or pictures as primes and words only for targets. Each prime-target pair did not have semantic or associative relation. ERPs were recorded from 64 scalp electrodes while the participants pressed either Happy or Sad buttons to indicate wheth...