The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) gratefully acknowledges Fujifilm as the Platinum sponsor for SfN’s 50th annual meeting, Neuroscience 2021.

Background: Psychosis is known to be associated with deficits in meta- and social cognition. The uncompetitive NMDA-receptor antagonist Ketamine has been identified to trigger psychotomimetic symptoms in healthy adults. We used Ketamine to investigate w...

Behavioral research has demonstrated three major components of the lexical-semantic processing system: automatic activation of semantic representations, strategic retrieval of semantic representations, and inhibition of competitors. However, these component processes are inherently conflated in explicit lexical-semantic decision tasks typically used in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research. Here, we combine the logic of behavioral priming studies and the neurophysiological phenomenon of fMRI priming to dissociate the neural bases of automatic and strategic lexical-semantic processes across a series of three studies. A single lexical decision task was used in all studies, with stimulus onset asynchrony or linguistic relationship between prime and target being manipulated. Study 1 demonstrated automatic semantic priming in the left mid-fusiform gyrus (mid-FFG) and strategic semantic priming in five regions: left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), bilateral anterior cingulate, anterior left inferior...

The amygdaloid complex in the medial temporal cortex has been considered a central structure involving fear mechanisms. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is appropriate for studying emotional processing because of its good spatial resolution and exceptional temporal resolution. Synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM), an adaptive beamformer technique used in the analysis of MEG data, allows the identification of power changes in specific frequency bands evoked by stimuli. Affective priming is a useful emotional verbal paradigm that emphasizes automatic processing. The main objective of the present investigation was to characterize amygdala MEG signals during performance on a linguistic affective priming task. Eight healthy volunteers (4 females, 4 males) were presented with a word-word paradigm involving emotional decision-making. We focused our analysis on 60 affectively congruent prime-target word pairs (30 negative, 30 positive). Using SAM, we analyzed the task activation differences between these two groups. ...

Sensory neurons dynamically optimize their tuning to encode stimuli across a wide range of environmental and behavioral conditions. Although such adaptation has been widely studied, its impact on the computations performed by neural circuits is not unde...

Cocaine self-administration (SA) in rats transiently decreases phospho-ERK2, GluN2A/B- containing NMDA receptors, and activates striatal-enriched protein tyrosine phosphatase (STEP) within the prelimbic (PrL) cortex during early abstinence, suggesting a...

During development, detection for many percepts matures gradually. This provides a natural system in which to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying performance differences: those aspects of neural activity that mature in conjunction with behavioral performance are more likely to subserve detection. In principle, the limitations on performance could be attributable to either immature sensory encoding mechanisms or an immature decoding of an already-mature sensory representation. To evaluate these alternatives in awake gerbil auditory cortex, we measured neural detection of sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (sAM) stimuli, for which behavioral detection thresholds display a prolonged maturation. A comparison of single-unit responses in juveniles and adults revealed that encoding of static tones was adult like in juveniles, but responses to sAM depth were immature. Since perceptual performance may reflect the activity of an animal's most sensitive neurons, we analyzed the d prime curves of single neurons...

Thalamic relay cells fire bursts of action potentials. Once a long hyperpolarization “primes” (deinactivates) the T-type calcium channel, a depolarizing input will “trigger” a calcium spike with a burst of action potentials. During sleep, bursts are frequent, rhythmic, and nonvisual. Bursts have been observed in alert animals, and burst timing is known to carry visual information under light anesthesia. We extend this finding by showing that bursts without visual triggers are rare. Nevertheless, if the channel were primed at random with respect to the stimulus, then bursts would have the same visual significance as single spikes. We find, however, that visual signals influence when the channel is primed. First, natural time-varying stimuli evoke more bursts than white noise. Second, specific visual stimuli reproducibly elicit bursts, whereas others reliably elicit single spikes. Therefore, visual information is encoded by the selective tagging of some responses as bursts. The visual information attributabl...

Reduction of brain temperature by a few degrees dramatically influences outcome following brain ischemia, and is still the only effective neuroprotective treatment brain ischemia in man. Several mechanisms have been proposed to contribute to the neuroprotective effect of therapeutic hypothermia, suggesting that multiple processes are involved. Receptor blockade or disruption scaffold protein-receptor interactions affect ischemic damage. Hence, the dendritic spines appear to be the prime site of action leading to cell death. Complex dynamic dendritic processes such as receptor trafficking or changes in spine morphology require cooperative processes of interaction of multiple protein-protein interactions which influence by small changes in temperature. Dendritic spines are motile structures, changing shape and length within the time span of seconds. This rapid motility is mainly due to changes in rearrangements of the cytoskeleton actin filaments. We studied the effect of temperature on spine motility using ...