SfN Announces the 2023 ECPA Class The 2023 class of Early Career Policy Ambassadors (ECPAs) has been announced! We welcome 10 early-career scientists representing a variety of career levels and geographic locations. Ambassadors gain the necessary skills to advocate for science and to encourage those in their personal networks to join the conversation, kicking off by participating in SfN’s annual Hill Day.

Human listeners achieve quick and effortless speech comprehension through computations of conditional probability using Bayes rule. However, the neural implementation of Bayesian perceptual inference remains unclear. Competitive-selection accounts (e.g., TRACE) propose that word recognition is achieved through direct inhibitory connections between units representing candidate words that share segments (e.g., hygiene and hijack share /haidʒ/). Manipulations that increase lexical uncertainty should increase neural responses associated with word recognition when words cannot be uniquely identified. In contrast, predictive-selection accounts (e.g., Predictive-Coding) propose that spoken word recognition involves comparing heard and predicted speech sounds and using prediction error to update lexical representations. Increased lexical uncertainty in words, such as hygiene and hijack , will increase prediction error and hence neural activity only at later time points when different segments are predicted. We col...

Neuropathic pain (NP) caused by sciatic nerve injury can significantly impact the quality of life of patients. The M1 phenotype of microglia has been reported to promote the progression of NP. Procaine is a lipid-soluble local anesthetic drug that exerts narcotic analgesic effects. Nevertheless, the detailed effect of procaine in NP is not clear. In order to explore the role of procaine in the polarization of NP microglia, HAPI cells were exposed to LPS to polarize into M1 type. In addition, the number of the M1 phenotype of HAPI cells was assessed using flow cytometry. The binding site between CCL5 and STAT3 was explored using the dual luciferase assay. Furthermore, in vivo experiments were applied for testing the impact of procaine on NP. LPS significantly inhibited HAPI cell viability, which was reversed by procaine. Consistently, procaine alleviated LPS-induced upregulation of inflammatory factors. Additionally, it significantly inhibited HAPI cell M1 polarization induced by LPS. Meanwhile, overexpress...

Interactive acoustic experience during infancy has been shown to impact neural measures of rapid auditory processing on a group level, enhancing markers of acoustic discrimination and generalizing to novel auditory stimuli. However, individual differenc...

The cerebellar long-term depression (LTD) is the long-lasting reduction of transmission efficacy at the granule neuron–Purkinje neuron (G–P) synapses and is a candidate mechanism for the motor learning. Despite extensive studies on its induction and expression mechanisms, it has not been known how long the LTD lasts. The LTD is accompanied by the decrease in the postsynaptic responsiveness to glutamate, the transmitter at G–P synapses. Therefore, during the LTD, the amplitude of miniature EPSCs (mEPSCs) at G–P synapses should decrease. We studied the depression of mEPSC amplitudes (DME) as a possible contributing factor for the LTD and found that the conditioning treatment of cultured cerebellar neurons with 50 mm K+ and 100 μmglutamate, an analogous condition used to induce the LTD, induced the long-lasting DME. The mEPSC amplitudes recovered to the original level 48 hr after the 5 min conditioning treatment. Changing the duration of the conditioning revealed that the DME consisted of two distinct phases:...

Priming is a form of implicit short-term memory (STM), defined as a change in the ability to process an object as the result of a recent encounter with that object. Priming is a key part of our daily life and has been studied extensively at the cognitiv...

Chronic pain is a debilitative disease affecting one in five adults globally and is a major risk factor for anxiety ( [Goldberg and McGee, 2011][1]; [Lurie, 2018][2]). Given the current dearth of available treatments for both individuals living with chronic pain and mental illnesses, there is a critical need for research into the molecular mechanisms involved in order to discover novel treatment targets. Cellular homeostasis is crucial for normal bodily functions, and investigations of this process may provide better understanding of the mechanisms driving the development of chronic pain. Using the spared nerve injury (SNI) model of neuropathic pain, we found contrasting roles for BECLIN-1 in the development of pain hypersensitivity and anxiety-like behaviors in a sex-dependent manner. Remarkably, we found that male SNI mice with impaired BECLIN-1 function demonstrated heightened mechanical and thermal hypersensitivity compared with male wild-type SNI mice, while female SNI mice with impaired BECLIN-1 func...

Early-life serotonin [5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT)] signaling modulates brain development, which impacts adult behavior, but 5-HT-sensitive periods, neural substrates, and behavioral consequences remain poorly understood. Here we identify the period ranging from postnatal day 2 (P2) to P11 as 5-HT sensitive, with 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) blockade increasing anxiety- and depression-like behavior, and impairing fear extinction learning and memory in adult mice. Concomitantly, P2–P11 5-HTT blockade causes dendritic hypotrophy and reduced excitability of infralimbic (IL) cortex pyramidal neurons that normally promote fear extinction. By contrast, the neighboring prelimbic (PL) pyramidal neurons, which normally inhibit fear extinction, become more excitable. Excitotoxic IL but not PL lesions in adult control mice reproduce the anxiety-related phenotypes. These findings suggest that increased 5-HT signaling during P2–P11 alters adult mPFC function to increase anxiety and impair fear extinction, and imply a differe...

In the article “Sox2 Sustains Recruitment of Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cells following CNS Demyelination and Primes Them for Differentiation during Remyelination” by Chao Zhao, Dan Ma, Malgorzata Zawadzka, Stephen P. J. Fancy, Lowri Elis-Williams, Guy Bouvier, John H. Stockley, Glaucia Monteiro

Microgliosis and astrogliosis are standard pathological features of neurodegenerative disease. Microglia are primed by chronic neurodegeneration such that toll-like receptor agonists, such as LPS, drive exaggerated cytokine responses on this background. However, sterile inflammatory insults are more common than direct CNS infection in the degenerating brain and these insults drive robust IL-1β and TNF-α responses. It is unclear whether these pro-inflammatory cytokines can directly induce exaggerated responses in the degenerating brain. We hypothesized that glial cells in the hippocampus of animals with chronic neurodegenerative disease (ME7 prion disease) would display exaggerated responses to central cytokine challenges. TNF-α or IL-1β were administered intrahippocampally to ME7-inoculated mice and normal brain homogenate-injected (NBH) controls. Both IL-1β and TNF-α produced much more robust IL-1β synthesis in ME7 than in NBH animals and this occurred exclusively in microglia. However, there was strong n...