Impulsive individuals excessively discount the value of delayed rewards, and this is thought to reflect deficits in brain regions critical for impulse control such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Delay discounting (DD) is an established measure of cognitive impulsivity, referring to the devaluation of rewards delayed in time. This study used male Wistar rats performing a DD task to test the hypothesis that neural activity states in ACC ensembles encode strategies that guide decision-making. Optogenetic silencing of ACC neurons exclusively increased impulsive choices at the 8 s delay by increasing the number of consecutive low-value, immediate choices. In contrast to shorter delays where animals preferred the delay option, no immediate or delay preference was detected at 8 s. These data suggest that ACC was critical for decisions requiring more deliberation between choice options. To address the role of ACC in this process, large-scale multiple single-unit recordings were performed and revealed that...

Early life represents a time of significant change and growth in many neurological processes; therefore, environmental stressors during this critical period may result in lasting perturbations in neurological function. We coupled two environmental chall...

The activity of ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons is a balance of excitatory and inhibitory inputs that is disrupted with repeated drug use, causing a shift to increased glutamate activation of these cells. Dopamine neurons receive inputs fr...

Prior studies have shown that neurons within the spinal cord can support instrumental learning (Grau et al., 1998, Behav. Neurosci., 112, 1366). In a typical experiment, rats undergo a thoracic (T2) transection and are subsequently tested for 30 min by ...

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is the most common form of epilepsy in adults and is associated with high rates of comorbidities including cognitive, behavioral, and affective disruptions. These comorbidities are not only detrimental to quality of life but...

Dendritic spines have received a lot of attention in the context of understanding the structure and plasticity of neuronal processing, while spines on axons are relatively rarely studied even though they are not uncommon (see for example Amaral 1978; Wi...

Signals for reward value are distributed widely throughout the brain and are thought to be important for evaluating sensory stimuli when faced with behavioral choices. One mechanism for normalizing the value of sensory information is divisive normalizat...

Our prior work demonstrates that adult prenatal alcohol exposed (PAE) male rats with minimal nerve injury develop allodynia (pathological light touch sensitivity) in concert with aberrant peripheral and spinal glial and immune activation. Nerve-injured ...

Interneuron loss is a prominent feature of temporal lobe epilepsy in both animals and humans and is hypothesized to be critical for epileptogenesis. As loss occurs concurrently with numerous other potentially proepileptogenic changes, however, the impact of interneuron loss in isolation remains unclear. For the present study, we developed an intersectional genetic approach to induce bilateral diphtheria toxin-mediated deletion of Vgat-expressing interneurons from dorsal and ventral hippocampus. In a separate group of mice, the same population was targeted for transient neuronal silencing with DREADDs. Interneuron ablation produced dramatic seizure clusters and persistent epileptiform activity. Surprisingly, after 1 week seizure activity declined precipitously and persistent epileptiform activity disappeared. Occasional seizures (≈1/day) persisted to the end of the experiment at 4 weeks. In contrast to the dramatic impact of interneuron ablation, transient silencing produced large numbers of interictal spik...

“Self-construal” refers to how individuals view and make meaning of the self, and at least two subtypes have been identified. Interdependent self-construal is a view of the self that includes relationships with others, and independent self-construal is a view of the self that does not include relations with others. It has been suggested that priming these two types of self-construal affects the cognitive processing style that an individual adopts, especially with regard to context sensitivity. Specifically, an interdependent self-construal is thought to promote attention to others and social context to a greater degree than an independent self-construal. To investigate this assertion, we elicited motor-evoked potentials with transcranial magnetic stimulation during an action observation task in which human participants were presented with either interdependent or independent self-construal prime words. Priming interdependent self-construal increased motor cortical output whereas priming independent self-co...