More than 30,000 neuroscientists and clinicians from around the world are expected to attend Neuroscience 2018, November 3–7, in San Diego. Join them by registering for this year’s annual meeting.

Smoking directly causes 18% of all deaths in the United States, and most smokers begin their habit during adolescence. Adolescence itself is a time of vulnerability to the effects of multiple drugs of abuse, including nicotine, the main addictive compou...

The degeneration of midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons disrupts the neural control of natural behavior, such as walking, posture, and gait in Parkinson’s disease. While some aspects of motor symptoms can be managed by dopamine replacement therapies, others respond poorly. Recent advancements in machine learning-based technologies offer opportunities to better understand the organizing principles of behavior modules at fine time scales and its dependence on dopaminergic modulation. In the present study, we applied the motion sequencing (MoSeq) platform to study the spontaneous locomotor activities of neurotoxin and genetic mouse models of Parkinsonism as the midbrain DA neurons progressively degenerate. We also evaluated the treatment efficacy of levodopa (L-DOPA) on behavioral modules at fine time scales. We revealed robust changes in the kinematics and usage of the behavioral modules that encode spontaneous locomotor activity. Further analysis demonstrates that fast behavioral modules with higher velocities w...

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Message From the President: Neuroscience 2017 Demonstrates the Centrality of Global Collaboration

We investigated the reliability of a working memory (WM) task, an adaptation of the Sternberg Item Recognition Paradigm (SIRP), for use as a biomarker for The MIND Institute (www.theMINDinstitute.org) multi-site, longitudinal study of schizophrenia. Ten healthy subjects (5 ♀) traveled to the four sites (UNM, UMN, UI, MGH) and scanned while performing 4 SIRP runs on each of two days (test-retest). Subjects were presented with memory sets of 1, 3 or 5 digits and then responded to each probe digit by indicating whether it was a target (member of the memorized set) or a foil. Outcome measures were response accuracy and slope and intercept of reaction time (RT) plotted by WM load. All subjects performed at or near ceiling accuracy (94.4 ± 3.2% correct). A straight line described the overall average RT by WM load data, 514.2 + 32.4*Load, R2=0.99. The RT data were best fit using a mixed model ANOVA with Load (1, 3, 5), Visit (test-retest), ProbeType (target, foil) and Order (sequence of sites) as fixed factors an...

Read science policy and advocacy news from the week of March 30, 2018

Introduction Visual cortex of the blind is known to be functionally reorganized to involve in the auditory processing, tactile processing, language and imagery. The reduced volume and decreased diffusion anisotrophy explain the anatomical aspect of disu...

Read science policy and advocacy news from the week of July 28, 2017.

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