Journal of Neuroscience

In competitive interactions, humans have to flexibly update their beliefs about another person's intentions in order to adjust their own choice strategy, such as when believing that the other may exploit their cooperativeness. Here we investigate both the neural dynamics and the causal neural substrate of belief updating processes in humans. We used an adapted prisoner's dilemma task in which participants explicitly predicted the co-player's actions, which allowed us to quantify the prediction error between expected and actual behaviour...

Genetic variants in the apolipoprotein E ( APOE ) gene affect the onset and progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The APOE Christchurch ( APOE Ch) variant has been identified as the most prominent candidate for preventing the onset and progression of AD. In this study, we generated isogenic APOE3 Ch/ 3 Ch human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from APOE3 / 3 healthy control female iPSCs and induced them into astrocytes. RNA expression analysis revealed the inherent resilience of APOE3 Ch/ 3 Ch astrocytes to induce a reactive state in response to inflammatory cytokines...

The behavioral and neural effects of the endogenous release of acetylcholine following stimulation of the Nucleus Basalis of Meynert (NB) have been recently examined in two male monkeys (Qi et al. 2021). Counterintuitively, NB stimulation enhanced behavioral performance while broadening neural tuning in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The mechanism by which a weaker mnemonic neural code could lead to better performance remains unclear. Here, we show that increased neural excitability in a simple continuous bump attractor model can induce broader neural tuning and decrease bump diffusion, provided neural rates are saturated...

When performing movements in rapid succession, the brain needs to coordinate ongoing execution with the preparation of an upcoming action. Here we identify the processes and brain areas involved in this ability of online preparation. Human participants (both male and female) performed pairs of single-finger presses or three-finger chords in rapid succession while 7T fMRI was recorded. In the overlap condition, they could prepare the second movement during the first response, in the non-overlap condition only after the first response was completed...

Vertebrate vision begins with light absorption by rod and cone photoreceptors, which transmit signals from their synaptic terminals to second-order neurons: bipolar and horizontal cells. In mouse rods, there is a single presynaptic ribbon-type active zone at which release of glutamate occurs tonically in the dark. This tonic glutamatergic signaling requires continuous exo- and endocytosis of synaptic vesicles. At conventional synapses, endocytosis commonly requires dynamins: GTPases encoded by three genes ( Dnm1-3 ), which perform membrane scission...

Faces and bodies are processed in separate but adjacent regions in primate visual cortex. Yet, the functional significance of dividing the whole person into areas dedicated to its face and body components and their neighboring locations remains unknown. Here we hypothesized that this separation and proximity together with a normalization mechanism generate clutter-tolerant representations of the face, body and whole person when presented in complex multi-category scenes. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a fMRI study, presenting images of a person within a multi-category scene to human male and female participants and assessed the contribution of each component to the response to the scene...

Structural differences along the hippocampal long-axis have long been believed to underlie meaningful functional differences. Recent findings show that data-driven parcellations of the hippocampus sub-divide the hippocampus into a 10-cluster map with anterior-medial, anterior-lateral, and posteroanterior-lateral, middle, and posterior components. We tested whether task and experience could modulate this clustering using a spatial learning experiment where male and female participants were trained to virtually navigate a novel neighborhood in a Google Street View-like environment...

Behaviours and their execution depend on the context and emotional state in which they are performed. The contextual modulation of behavior likely relies on regions such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that multiplex information about emotional/autonomic states and behaviours. The objective of the present study was to understand how the representations of behaviors by ACC neurons become modified when performed in different emotional states. A pipeline of machine learning techniques was developed to categorize and classify complex, spontaneous behaviors in male rats from video...

Cocaine use disorder is a significant public health issue without an effective pharmacological treatment. Successful treatments are hindered in part by an incomplete understanding of the molecular mechanisms that underlie long-lasting maladaptive plasticity and addiction-like behaviors. Here, we leverage a large RNA-sequencing dataset to generate gene co-expression networks across 6 interconnected regions of the brain's reward circuitry from mice that underwent saline or cocaine self-administration. We identify phosphodiesterase 1b ( Pde1b ), a Ca2+ /calmodulin-dependent enzyme that increases cAMP and cGMP hydrolysis, as a central hub gene within a nucleus accumbens (NAc) gene module that was bioinformatically associated with addiction-like behavior...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Foraging decisions involve assessing potential risks and prioritizing food sources, which can be difficult when confronted with changing and conflicting circumstances. A crucial aspect of this decision-making process is the ability to actively overcome defensive reactions to threats and focus on achieving specific goals. The ventral pallidum (VP) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) are two brain regions that play key roles in regulating behavior motivated by either rewards or threats. However, it is unclear whether these regions are necessary in decision-making processes involving competing motivational drives during conflict...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Most of mammalian physiology is under the control of biological rhythms, including the endocrine system with time-varying hormone secretion. Precision neuroimaging studies provide unique insights into how the endocrine system dynamically regulates aspects of the human brain. Recently, we established estrogen's ability to drive widespread patterns of connectivity and enhance the global efficiency of large-scale brain networks in a woman sampled every 24h across 30 consecutive days, capturing a complete menstrual cycle...

Humans have the remarkable ability to vividly retrieve sensory details of past events. According to the theory of sensory reinstatement, during remembering, brain regions specialized for processing specific sensory stimuli are reactivated to support content specific retrieval. Recently, several studies have emphasized transformations in the spatial organization of these reinstated activity patterns. Specifically, studies of scene stimuli suggest a clear anterior shift in the location of retrieval activations compared with activity observed during perception...

According to the predictive processing framework, perception emerges from the reciprocal exchange of predictions and prediction errors (PE) between hierarchically organized neural circuits. The nonlemniscal division of the inferior colliculus (IC) is the earliest source of auditory PE signals, but their neuronal generators, properties and functional relevance have remained mostly undefined. We recorded single-unit mismatch responses to auditory oddball stimulation at different intensities, together with activity evoked by two sequences of alternating tones to control frequency-specific effects...

The lateral intraparietal area (LIP) plays a crucial role in target selection and attention in primates, but the laminar microcircuitry of this region is largely unknown. To address this, we used ultra-high density laminar electrophysiology with Neuropixels probes to record neural activity in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of two adult marmosets while they performed a simple visual target selection task. Our results reveal neural correlates of visual target selection in the marmoset, similar to those observed in macaques and humans, with distinct timing and profiles of activity across cell types and cortical layers...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.