Creativity can be driven by negative intentions, and this is called malevolent creativity (MC). It is a type of creativity that serves antisocial purposes and deliberately leads to harmful or immoral results. A possible classification indicates that there are three kinds of MC in daily life: hurting people, lying, and playing tricks. This study aimed to explore similar and distinct neural substrates underlying these different kinds of MC idea generation. The participants were asked to perform different MC tasks, and their neural responses were recorded using a functional near-infrared spectroscopy device. The findings revealed that most regions within the prefrontal and temporal lobes [e.g., the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC), and right angular gyrus] were involved in the three MC tasks. However, the right frontopolar cortex (rFPC) was more activated and less coupled with the rDLPFC and right precuneus during the lying task than during the other tasks. Thus, rFPC may play an important role i...

Rapid saccadic eye movements are used by animals to sample different parts of the visual scene. Previous work has investigated neural correlates of these saccades in visual cortical areas such as V1; however, how saccade-responsive neurons are distributed across visual areas, cell types, and cortical layers has remained unknown. Through analyzing 818 1 h experimental sessions from the Allen Brain Observatory, we present a large-scale analysis of saccadic behaviors in head-fixed mice and their neural correlates. We find that saccade-responsive neurons are present across visual cortex, but their distribution varies considerably by transgenically defined cell type, cortical area, and cortical layer. We also find that saccade-responsive neurons do not exhibit distinct visual response properties from the broader neural population, suggesting that the saccadic responses of these neurons are likely not predominantly visually driven. These results provide insight into the roles played by different cell types withi...

Neuropathic pain is stubborn and associated with the peripheral nerve regeneration process. Nicotine has been found to reduce pain, but whether it is involved in the regulation of nerve regeneration and the underlying mechanism are unknown. In this study, we examined the mechanical allodynia thermal hyperalgesia together with the peripheral nerve regeneration after nicotine exposure in two rat neuropathic pain models. In the spinal nerve ligation model, in which anatomic nerve regeneration can be easily observed, nicotine reduced anatomic measures of regeneration as well as expression of regeneration marker growth-associated protein 43 (GAP43). In the tibial nerve crush model, nicotine treatment significantly suppressed GAP43 expression and functional reinnervation as measured by myelinated action potential and electromyography of gastrocnemius. In both models, nicotine treatment reduced macrophage density in the sensory ganglia and peripheral nerve. These effects of nicotine were reversed by the selective...

To survive, animals must meet their biological needs while simultaneously avoiding danger. However, the neurobiological basis of appetitive and aversive survival behaviors has historically been studied using separate behavioral tasks. While recent studies in mice have quantified appetitive and aversive conditioned responses simultaneously ([Jikomes et al., 2016][1]; [Heinz et al., 2017][2]), these tasks required different behavioral responses to each stimulus. As many brain regions involved in survival behavior process stimuli of opposite valence, we developed a paradigm in which mice perform the same response (nose poke) to distinct auditory cues to obtain a rewarding outcome (palatable food) or avoid an aversive outcome (mild footshoock). This design allows for both within-subject and between-subject comparisons as animals respond to appetitive and aversive cues. The central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) is implicated in the regulation of responses to stimuli of either valence. Considering its role in th...

Recent work in Drosophila has uncovered several neighboring classes of sleep-regulatory neurons within the central complex. However, the logic of connectivity and network motifs remains limited by the incomplete examination of relevant cell types. Using a recent genetic–anatomic classification of ellipsoid body ring neurons, we conducted a thermogenetic screen in female flies to assess sleep/wake behavior and identified two wake-promoting drivers that label ER3d neurons and two sleep-promoting drivers that express in ER3m cells. We then used intersectional genetics to refine driver expression patterns. Activation of ER3d cells shortened sleep bouts, suggesting a key role in sleep maintenance. While sleep-promoting drivers from our mini-screen label overlapping ER3m neurons, intersectional strategies cannot rule out sleep regulatory roles for additional neurons in their expression patterns. Suppressing GABA synthesis in ER3m neurons prevents postinjury sleep, and GABAergic ER3d cells are required for thermo...

Stress alters social functioning in a complex manner. An important variable determining the final effects of stress is stressor intensity. However, the precise relationship between stressor intensity and social behavior is not well understood. Here, we investigate the effects of varying acute stressor intensity exposure on social behavior using adult zebrafish. We first establish a novel test using adult zebrafish that allows distinguishing fish’s drive to approach a social cue and its ability to engage and maintain social interaction within the same behavioral paradigm. Next, we combined this test with a new method to deliver an acute stress stimulus of varying intensities. Our results show that both social approach and social maintenance are reduced in adult zebrafish on acute stress exposure in an intensity-dependent manner. Interestingly, lower stress intensity reduces social maintenance without affecting the social approach, while a higher stress level is required to alter social approach. These resul...

When a Pavlovian cue is presented separately from its associated reward, some animals will acquire a sign tracking (ST) response – approach and/or interaction with the cue – while others will acquire a goal tracking response – approach to the site of reward. We have previously shown that cue-evoked excitations in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) encode the vigor of both behaviors; in contrast, reward-related responses diverge over the course of training, possibly reflecting neurochemical differences between sign tracker and goal tracker individuals. However, a substantial subset of neurons in the NAc exhibit inhibitory, rather than excitatory, cue-evoked responses, and the evolution of their signaling during Pavlovian conditioning remains unknown. Using single-neuron recordings in behaving rats, we show that NAc neurons with cue-evoked inhibitions have distinct coding properties from neurons with cue-evoked excitations. Cue-evoked inhibitions become more numerous over the course of training and, like excitation...

While it is commonly assumed that stressful events are vividly remembered, it remains largely unknown whether all aspects of memory for a stressful episode are enhanced. In this preregistered study, we tested whether stress enhances later remembering of individual elements of a stressful episode at the cost of impaired processing of the association between these elements. Therefore, male and female participants ( N  = 122) underwent a stressful (or control) episode during which they encoded a series of stimuli. To investigate stress effects on the memory for individual events and the links between these, we used temporal sequence effects in recognition memory tested 24 h after encoding. Specifically, we tested whether stress would affect the memory enhancement for a target item if this is preceded by another item that also preceded the target during encoding (recognition priming). Our results showed that participants recalled single events encoded under stress better than those encoded under nonstressful c...

As the European Flagship Human Brain Project (HBP) ends in September 2023, a meeting dedicated to the Partnering Projects (PPs), a collective of independent research groups that partnered with the HBP, was held on September 4–7, 2022. The purpose of this meeting was to allow these groups to present their results, reflect on their collaboration with the HBP and discuss future interactions with the European Research Infrastructure (RI) EBRAINS that has emerged from the HBP. In this report, we share the tour-de-force that the Partnering Projects that were present in the meeting have made in furthering knowledge concerning various aspects of Brain Research with the HBP. We describe briefly major achievements of the HBP Partnering Projects in terms of a systems-level understanding of the functional architecture of the brain and its possible emulation in artificial systems. We then recapitulate open discussions with EBRAINS representatives about the evolution of EBRAINS as a sustainable Research Infrastructure f...

Subjective uncertainty arises because the estimation of the timing of an event into the future is error prone. This impact of stimulus-bound uncertainty on movement preparation has often been investigated using reaction time tasks where a warning stimulus (WS) predicts the occurrence of a “go” signal. The timing of the “go” signal can be chosen from a particular probability distribution with a given variance or uncertainty. It has been repeatedly shown that reaction times covary with the shape of the used “go” signal distribution. This is interpreted as evidence for temporal preparation. Moreover, the variance of the response time should always increase with the duration of the delay between the WS and the “go” signal. This increasing variance has been interpreted as a consequence of the temporal “blurring” of future events (scalar expectancy). The present paper tested the validity of the temporal “blurring” hypothesis in humans with a simple oculomotor reaction time task where subjective and stimulus-boun...