The diagnostic criteria of late-life neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease is transforming from using clinical to biomarker-based features. Measures of brain amyloid are, for example, used to define a pre-clinical stage of Alzheimer’s d...

Read advocacy news from the week of October 7, 2016

SfN strongly recommends against entering into agreements with companies that are not directly contracted by SfN.

The endocannabinoid (eCB) signaling system is robustly expressed in the cerebellum from embryonic developmental stages to adulthood. It plays a key role in regulating cerebellar synaptic plasticity and excitability, suggesting that impaired eCB signaling could lead to deficits in cerebellar adjustments of ongoing behaviors and cerebellar learning. Indeed, human mutations in DAGLα are associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. In this study, we show that selective deletion of the eCB synthesizing enzyme diacylglycerol lipase alpha (Daglα) from mouse cerebellar Purkinje cells (PCs) alters motor and social behaviors, disrupts short-term synaptic plasticity in both excitatory and inhibitory synapses, and reduces PC activity during social exploration. Our results provide the first evidence for cerebellar-specific eCB regulation of social behaviors and implicate eCB regulation of synaptic plasticity and PC activity as the neural substrates contributing to these deficits. Significance statement Deletion of th...

SfN congratulates a trio of longtime scientific collaborators »

Week of June 3, 2019: Read the Latest Advocacy and Science News

Understanding the ability to self-evaluate decisions is an active area of research. This research has primarily focused on the neural correlates of self-evaluation during visual tasks and whether neural correlates before or after the primary decision contribute to self-reported confidence. This focus has been useful, yet the reliance on subjective confidence reports may confound our understanding of key everyday features of metacognitive self-evaluation: that decisions must be rapidly evaluated without explicit feedback and unfold in a multisensory world. These considerations led us to hypothesize that an automatic domain-general metacognitive signal may be shared between sensory modalities, which we tested in the present study with multivariate decoding of electroencephalographic (EEG) data. Participants ( N  = 21, 12 female) first performed a visual task with no request for self-evaluations of performance, prior to an auditory task that included rating decision confidence on each trial. A multivariate cl...

Illusionism is a general philosophical framework in which specific theories of consciousness can be constructed without having to invoke a magical mind essence. The advantages of illusionism are not widely recognized, perhaps because scholars tend to think only of the most extreme forms and miss the range of possibilities. The brain's internal models are never fully accurate, nothing is exactly as the brain represents it, and therefore some element of illusionism is almost certainly necessary for any working theory of consciousness or of any other property that is accessed through introspection. Here I describe the illusionist framework and propose six specific theories. One purpose of this article is to demonstrate the range of possibilities in a domain that is not yet sufficiently explored. The second purpose is to argue that even existing, popular theories, such as the integrated information theory or the global workspace theory, can be transformed and greatly strengthened by adding an illusionist layer...

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will present John Pollock, PhD; Nancy Michael, PhD; Taissa Lytchenko; and Brian Lim, with this year’s Science Education and Outreach Awards, comprising the Science Educator and the Next Generation Awards.