When faced with multiple potential movement options, individuals either reach directly to one of the options, or initiate a reach intermediate between the options. It remains unclear why people generate these two types of behaviors. Using the go-before-you-know task (commonly used to study behavior under choice uncertainty) in humans, we examined two key questions. First, do these two types of responses actually reflect distinct movement strategies? If so, the relative desirability (i.e., weighing the success likelihood vs the attainable reward) of the two target options would not need to be computed identically for direct and intermediate reaches. We showed that indeed, when reward and success likelihood differed between the two options, reach direction was preferentially biased toward different directions for direct versus intermediate reaches. Importantly, this suggests that the computation of subjective values depends on the choice of movement strategy. Second, what drives individual differences in how...

It has been shown that P3b is not a signature of perceptual awareness per se but is instead more closely associated with postperceptual processing ([Cohen et al., 2020][1]). Here, we seek to investigate whether human participants’ attentional states are different in the report and the no-report conditions. This difference in attentional states, if exists, may lead to degraded consciousness of the stimuli in the no-report condition, and it therefore remains unknown whether the disappearance of P3b is because of a lack of reportability or degraded consciousness. Results of our experiment 1 showed that participants did experience degraded contents of consciousness in the no-report condition. However, results of experiment 2 showed that the degraded contents of consciousness did not influence the amplitude of P3b. These findings strengthen the claim that P3b is not a signature of perceptual awareness but is associated with postperceptual processing. [1]: #ref-14

The opioid crisis has contributed to a growing population of children exposed to opioids during fetal development; however, many of the long-term effects of opioid exposure on development are unknown. We previously demonstrated that opioids have deleterious effects on endocannabinoid plasticity at glutamate synapses in the dorsal striatum of adolescent rodents, but it is unclear whether prenatal opioid exposure produces similar neuroadaptations. Using a mouse model of prenatal methadone exposure (PME), we performed proteomics, phosphoproteomics, and patch-clamp electrophysiology in the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) and dorsomedial striatum (DMS) to examine synaptic functioning in adolescent PME offspring. PME impacted the proteome and phosphoproteome in a region- and sex-dependent manner. Many proteins and phosphorylated proteins associated with glutamate transmission were differentially abundant in PME offspring, which was associated with reduced glutamate release in the DLS and altered the rise time of exc...

Target reward influences motor planning strategies through modulation of movement vigor. Considering current theories of sensorimotor control suggesting that movement planning consists in selecting a goal-directed control strategy, we sought to investigate the influence of reward on feedback control. Here, we explored this question in three human reaching experiments. First, we altered the explicit reward associated with the goal target and found an overall increase in feedback gains for higher target rewards, highlighted by larger velocities, feedback responses to external loads, and background muscle activity. Then, we investigated whether the differences in target rewards across multiple goals impacted rapid motor decisions during movement. We observed idiosyncratic switching strategies dependent on both target rewards and, surprisingly, the feedback gains at perturbation onset: the more vigorous movements were less likely to switch to a new goal following perturbations. To gain further insight into a c...

Electron microscopy (EM)-based connectomes provide important insights into how visual circuitry of fruit fly Drosophila computes various visual features, guiding and complementing behavioral and physiological studies. However, connectomic analyses of the lobula, a neuropil putatively dedicated to detecting object-like features, remains underdeveloped, largely because of incomplete data on the inputs to the brain region. Here, we attempted to map the columnar inputs into the Drosophila lobula neuropil by performing connectivity-based and morphology-based clustering on a densely reconstructed connectome dataset. While the dataset mostly lacked visual neuropils other than lobula, which would normally help identify inputs to lobula, our clustering analysis successfully extracted clusters of cells with homogeneous connectivity and morphology, likely representing genuine cell types. We were able to draw a correspondence between the resulting clusters and previously identified cell types, revealing previously und...

As you know, the raison d’être of eNeuro is to serve the neuroscience community. The main mission of the journal is to publish excellent and reliable results, while making sure that authors, reviewers, and reviewing editors have a great experience. But eNeuro offers other services to the community, as well: it is a forum open to all if the message you want to convey can help us neuroscientists, teach us something, question us, or make us reflect on important matters. The present state of neuroscience is not only the result of the knowledge that is being accumulated over time but also strongly influenced by …

Ten-eleven translocation (TET) proteins are crucial epigenetic regulators highly conserved in multicellular organisms. TETs’ enzymatic function in demethylating 5-methyl cytosine in DNA is required for proper development and TETs are frequently mutated in cancer. Recently, Drosophila melanogaster Tet (dTet) was shown to be highly expressed in developing fly brains and discovered to play an important role in brain and muscle development as well as fly behavior. Furthermore, dTet was shown to have different substrate specificity compared with mammals. However, the exact role dTet plays in glial cells and how ectopic TET expression in glial cells contributes to tumorigenesis and glioma is still not clear. Here, we report a novel role for dTet specifically in glial cell organization and number. We show that loss of dTet affects the organization of a specific glia population in the optic lobe, the “optic chiasm” glia. Additionally, we find irregularities in axon patterns in the ventral nerve cord (VNC) both, in...

In the article “MEYE: Web App for Translational and Real-Time Pupillometry,” by Raffaele Mazziotti, Fabio Carrara, Aurelia Viglione, Leonardo Lupori, Luca Lo …

The perirhinal cortex (PER) and postrhinal cortex (POR) in the medial temporal lobe are commonly described as two distinct systems that process nonspatial and spatial information, respectively. Recent findings suggest that the two regions exhibit functional overlap when processing stimulus information, especially when associative responses are required in goal-directed behavior. However, we lack the neural correlates of this. In the current study, we recorded spiking activities for single units of the PER and POR as rats were required to choose a response associated with the identity of a visual object or scene stimulus. We found that similar proportions of cells fired selectively for either scene or object between the two regions. In the PER and POR, response-selective neurons showed higher contrast for different responses than stimulus-selective cells did for stimuli. More cells fired selectively for specific choice response in the POR than in the PER. The differential firing patterns of the PER and POR ...

θ-Scale coordination of prelimbic medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) local field potentials (LFPs) and its influence via direct or indirect projections to the ventral hippocampus (vHC) and dorsal hippocampus (dHC) during spatial learning remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that θ frequency coordination dynamics within and between the mPFC, dHC, and vHC would be predetermined by the level of connectivity rather than reflecting differing circuit throughput relationships depending on cognitive demands. Moreover, we hypothesized that coherence levels would not change during learning of a complex spatial avoidance task. Adult male rats were bilaterally implanted with EEG electrodes and LFPs recorded in each structure. Contrary to predictions, θ coherence averaged across “Early” or “Late” training sessions in the mPFC-HC, mPFC-mPFC, and HC-HC increased as a function of task learning. Coherence levels were also highest between the indirectly connected mPFC-dHC circuit, particularly during early training. Alth...