Auditory masking—the interference of the encoding and processing of an acoustic stimulus imposed by one or more competing stimuli—is nearly omnipresent in daily life and presents a critical barrier to many listeners, including people with hearing loss, users of hearing aids and cochlear implants, and people with auditory processing disorders. The perceptual aspects of masking have been actively studied for several decades, and particular emphasis has been placed on masking of speech by other speech sounds. The neural effects of such masking, especially at the subcortical level, have been much less studied, in large part due to the technical limitations of making such measurements. Recent work has allowed estimation of the auditory brainstem response (ABR), whose characteristic waves are linked to specific subcortical areas, to naturalistic speech. In this study, we used those techniques to measure the encoding of speech stimuli that were masked by one or more simultaneous other speech stimuli. We presented...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) adversely affects the learning, social interaction, and daily living of affected children. Atomoxetine (ATX) hydrochloride (HCI) has been widely used in clinical practice. Electroencephalogram (EEG) biofeedback, as a nonpharmacological treatment approach, has also demonstrated potential in improving symptoms in children with ADHD. We aimed to investigate the clinical efficacy of combining ATX HCI with EEG biofeedback in the treatment of ADHD in children. We hypothesized that this combined therapy would be more effective in alleviating symptoms in children with ADHD. Ninety children with ADHD were randomly separated into the control group (receiving ATX HCI treatment for 12 weeks) and study group (receiving ATX HCI treatment for 12 weeks combined with 60 sessions of EEG biofeedback treatment; n  = 45). Swanson, Nolan, and Pelham-IV (SNAP-IV) rating scale scores, integrated visual and auditory continuous performance test results, Conners parent symptom question...

The explore/exploit trade-off is a fundamental property of choice selection during reward-guided decision making, where the “same” choice can reflect either of these internal cognitive states. An unanswered question is whether the execution of a decision provides an underexplored measure of internal cognitive states. Touchscreens are increasingly used across species for cognitive testing and afford the ability to measure the precise location of choice touch responses. We examined how male and female mice in a restless bandit decision making task interacted with a touchscreen to determine if the explore/exploit trade-off, prior reward, and/or sex differences change the variability in the kinetics of touchscreen choices. During exploit states, successive touch responses are closer together than those made in an explore state, suggesting exploit states reflect periods of increased motor stereotypy. Although exploit decisions might be expected to be rewarded more frequently than explore decisions, we find that...

A mouse study published in JNeurosci shows how abnormal brain development and maternal stress may interact to produce schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders.

Dravet syndrome (DS) is a genetic epileptic encephalopathy usually caused by mutations in the Scn1a gene, which encodes the α1 subunit of the voltage-gated sodium channel NaV1.1. Clinically, patients are affected by multiple types of seizures that begin...

SfN successfully competed for a five-year grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to continue its longstanding Neuroscience Scholars Program.

Neuroscience 2022 November 12 - 16 (Meeting Dates) | November 13 - 16 (Exhibit Dates) San Diego Convention Center | Halls B - H

Founded in 1969, the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) now has nearly 35,000 members in more than 95 countries. Year-round programming includes the publishing of two highly regarded scientific journals, JNeurosci and eNeuro; professional development resources and career training through Neuronline¸ the Society’s home for learning and discussion; science advocacy and public policy engagement including annual Capitol Hill Day; and a variety of engaging public outreach efforts, led by the expanding and interactive collection of public-facing resources on BrainFacts.org.

Founded in 1969, the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) now has nearly 35,000 members in more than 95 countries. Year-round programming includes the publishing of two highly regarded scientific journals, JNeurosci and eNeuro; professional development resources and career training through Neuronline¸ the Society’s home for learning and discussion; science advocacy and public policy engagement including annual Capitol Hill Day; and a variety of engaging public outreach efforts, led by the expanding and interactive collection of public-facing resources on BrainFacts.org.

Neuroscientists are increasingly initiating large-scale collaborations which bring together tens to hundreds of researchers. At this scale, such projects can tackle big challenges and engage diverse participants. Inspired by projects in mathematics, we set out to test the feasibility of widening access to such projects even further, by running a massively collaborative project in computational neuroscience. The key difference, with prior neuroscientific efforts, being that our entire project (code, results, and writing) was public from the outset, and that anyone could participate. To achieve this, we launched a public Git repository, with code for training spiking neural networks to solve a sound localization task via surrogate gradient descent. We then invited anyone, anywhere to use this code as a springboard for exploring questions of interest to them, and encouraged participants to share their work both asynchronously through Git and synchronously at online workshops. Our hope was that the resulting r...