Cognitive flexibility, a mental process crucial for adaptive behavior, involves multi-scale functioning across several neuronal organization levels. While the neural underpinnings of flexibility have been studied for decades, limited knowledge exists about the structure and age-related differentiation of the white matter subserving brain regions implicated in cognitive flexibility. This study investigated the population-level relationship between cognitive flexibility and properties of white matter across two periods of human adulthood, aiming to discern how these associations vary over different life stages and brain tracts among men and women. We propose a novel framework to study age effects in brain structure-function associations. First, a meta-analysis was conducted to identify neural regions associated with cognitive flexibility. Next, the white matter projections of these neural regions were traced through the Human Connectome Project tractography template to identify the white matter structure ass...

Much conversation has occurred regarding increasing wealth inequality over the years in the United States. We wished to examine this issue with respect to National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. Substantial increases have occurred in NIH funding over recent years. According to SfN’s congressional testimony on NIH funding, the agency’s budget has grown by $9 billion in the past six years. While many have acknowledged the value of this increased investment in research, colleagues at smaller institutions have anecdotally not noticed a major change. We examined whether relevant data could address if there is, indeed, an increase in wealth inequality in NIH-research funding across institutions in the United States.

Much conversation has occurred regarding increasing wealth inequality over the years in the United States. We wished to examine this issue with respect to National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. Substantial increases have occurred in NIH funding over recent years. According to SfN’s congressional testimony on NIH funding, the agency’s budget has grown by $9 billion in the past six years. While many have acknowledged the value of this increased investment in research, colleagues at smaller institutions have anecdotally not noticed a major change. We examined whether relevant data could address if there is, indeed, an increase in wealth inequality in NIH-research funding across institutions in the United States.

Felix Schneider discusses his paper, “Neuron Replating, a Powerful and Versatile Approach to Study Early Aspects of Neuron Differentiation,” published in Vol. 8, Issue 3 of eNeuro, with Editor-in-Chief Christophe Bernard. 

Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep is characterized by the interaction of multiple oscillations essential for memory consolidation, alongside a dynamic arrhythmic 1/f scale-free background that may also contribute to its functions. Recent spectral parametrization methods, such as FOOOF (Fitting-One-and-Over-f) and IRASA, enable the dissociation of rhythmic and arrhythmic components in the spectral domain; however, they do not resolve these processes in the time domain. Instantaneous measures of frequency, amplitude, and phase-amplitude coupling are thus still confounded by fluctuations in arrhythmic activity. This limitation represents a significant pitfall for studies of NREM sleep, often relying on instantaneous estimates to investigate the coupling of specific oscillations. To address this limitation, we introduce 'Rhythms & Background' ( RnB ), a novel wavelet-based methodology designed to dynamically denoise time-series data of arrhythmic interference. This enables the extraction of purely rhythmic t...

Natural environments contain behaviorally-relevant information along many stimulus dimensions, each of which sensory systems must encode in order to guide behaviors. For example, mammalian visual cortex encodes features of visual scenes such as spatial information related to object identity and temporal information about the motion of those objects in space. In order to reliably encode these behaviorally-relevant visual features, neural representations should be robust to changes in environmental conditions. Further, information about changes in environmental conditions, such as the luminance changes that occur over the course of a day, are also important for guiding behaviors. In this study, we asked whether mouse primary visual cortex (V1) jointly represents the spatial properties of visual stimuli along with changes in the mean luminance of the visual scene. We find that while V1 neurons, in mice of either sex, encode spatial aspects of visual information in an invariant manner across luminance conditio...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is one of the top behavioral causes of global disease burden in the United States. Repeated cycles of alcohol intoxication and abstinence induce neuroplastic alterations which induce excessive drinking and cognitive impairments. A system deeply dysregulated by chronic drinking is norepinephrine (NE). At moderate levels, NE has beneficial effects on cognition and behavior, mediated by the α2 adrenergic receptor (AR) subtype. Whether α2 AR activation blunts alcohol consumption in models of heavy drinking has not been determined, and whether α2 AR activation improves cognitive performance following chronic alcohol is unknown. Here, we show that the α2 AR agonist clonidine worsens ethanol-induced hypothermia and sedation in male mice, while the more selective α2 AR agonist guanfacine is devoid of these effects. We also observed that, in male and female mice, while both clonidine and guanfacine reduce heavy alcohol drinking, guanfacine does so with higher potency. Furthermore, guanfac...

Mala Murthy will highlight discoveries from her lab on the neural mechanisms and computations underlying social communication in the Drosophila model system and the many parallels with communication strategies in other animals, including humans. She will explain the important role of developing quantitative tools for studying behavior. She will also discuss the choices that led her and her lab down this research path and the role of effective communication in science.

Episodic timing refers to the one-shot, automatic encoding of temporal information in the brain, in the absence of attention to time. A previous magnetoencephalography (MEG) study showed that the relative burst time of spontaneous alpha oscillations (α) during quiet wakefulness was a selective predictor of retrospective duration estimation. This observation was interpreted as α embodying the "ticks" of an internal contextual clock. Herein, we replicate and extend these findings using electroencephalography (EEG), assess robustness to time-on-task effects, and test the generalizability in virtual reality (VR) environments. In three EEG experiments, 128 participants of either sex underwent 4-minute eyes-open resting-state recordings followed by an unexpected retrospective duration estimation task. Experiment 1 tested participants before any tasks, Experiment 2 after 90 minutes of timing tasks, and Experiment 3 in VR environments of different sizes. We successfully replicated the original MEG findings in Expe...

Daughterless (Da), the Drosophila melanogaster homolog of mammalian Transcription factor 4 (TCF4), is well studied in fruit fly embryonic development but its functions in adult nervous system are poorly understood. Mutations in human TCF4 lead to intellectual disabilities such as Pitt-Hopkins syndrome (PTHS) and TCF4 has also been linked to schizophrenia. Here, to explore the roles of Da in Drosophila mature brain, we map Da DNA binding sites and study the transcriptomics of the brains where Da function is inhibited by pan-neuronal Extramacrohaete (Emc) overexpression, in both male and female Drosophila . Our transcriptome analyses reveal that in the adult brain Da regulates the expression of genes involved in behaviour, memory, synaptic signaling, protein translation and metabolic processes. Moreover, combining the RNA-sequencing data with Da ChIP-seq results indicates that genes associated with neuronal projection guidance, metabolism and translation are direct targets of Da. In addition, we validate the...