This session features a clinician scientist whose career in neurology and neuroscience focuses on understanding the underlying causes of ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases, as well as the factors that determine disease susceptibility versus disease resilience. Clinical studies have linked ALS risk with select occupations, environmental pollution, polygenic risk, and changes in the immune system. The speaker’s goal, motivated by the new ALS cases diagnosed weekly, is to make ALS a preventable disease by modifying currently identified and future ALS risk factors.

Acetylcholine (ACh) transmission is critical for cognition and attention but is also released in response to stress. Importantly, ACh levels are dysregulated in the brains of human depressed subjects. Using the example of ACh signaling in stress-relevant behaviors, this session will present data using genetically-encoded fluorescent ACh sensors, explore what we can conclude about human stress disorders from mouse models, and address the question of what a neuromodulator is in the context of classical neurotransmitter signaling.

From the point of view of a developmental neurobiologist and university vice president promoting communications and diversity, this session will discuss the importance of networking, mentorship, and the need for diverse role models to inspire the next generation of neuroscientists worldwide. Case studies and insights to help young researchers navigate this exciting and evolving field of developmental neurobiology will be shared.

The flexible control of working memory (WM) requires prioritizing immediately task-relevant information while maintaining information with potential future relevance in a deprioritized state. Using double-serial retrocuing (DSR) with simultaneous EEG recording, we investigated how single pulses of transcranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) to right intraparietal sulcus impacts neural representations of unprioritized memory items (UMI), relative to irrelevant memory items (IMI) that are no longer needed for the trial. Twelve human participants (8 female) performed DSR plus a single-retrocue task, while spTMS was delivered during delay periods. Multivariate pattern analysis revealed that spTMS restored decodability of the UMI concurrent with stimulation, and that of the IMI several timesteps later, after the evoked effects of spTMS were no longer present in the EEG signal. This effect was carried by the alpha (8-13 Hz) and low-beta (13-20 Hz) frequency bands. Analyses of the raw EEG signal showed two effects ...

Despite major advances in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), decoding high-level language representations prior to speech remains challenging. While prior efforts have primarily focused on acoustic or articulatory features, how semantic categories are decoded in time and space remains unclear. Here, we investigated how semantic representations unfold over time by analyzing high-gamma (HG, 70–170 Hz) electrocorticography (ECoG) signals from twenty subjects (7 females and 13 males) performing a word-reading task involving body- and non-body-related words. HG activity was examined from word presentation to 500 ms, capturing the pre-speech window. Group-level time-resolved decoding, pooling features across subjects within each Brodmann area (BA), revealed significant classification accuracy above chance in both hemispheres (p<0.05, FDR-corrected). In the left hemisphere, peak-performing BAs followed a frontal–temporal–occipital–parietal cascade: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) (50 ms), inferior temporal ...

Extinction-reinstatement paradigms have been used to study reward-seeking for both food and drug rewards. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is of particular interest in reinstatement due to its ability to energize motivated behavior. Previous work found that suppression of neuronal activity or dopamine signaling in NAc reduces reinstatement of food-seeking. Here we used fiber photometry and sensor multiplexing (red-shifted dopamine sensor and genetically-encoded calcium indicator) to measure dopamine and calcium in NAc core of male and female rats on each day of an extinction-reinstatement paradigm with food reward to determine how signals vary across task phases. During self-administration training, we detected positive dopamine transients that initially followed lever-pressing but moved earlier in time as training progressed. A post-press dopamine decrease also emerged with training. For calcium, a decrease from baseline occurred after the press and became more prominent across training. Both patterns were red...

Interest in myelinated cells for neurobiologists has essentially been driven by research on demyelinating disorders. The majority of myelin is formed postnatally in the rodents and by adulthood in humans. Although myelin plasticity in response to neuronal activity is an old observation, its extent has been appreciated relatively recently. However, over recent years, myelinating cells have been found to participate to neural plasticity, being modified by neural activity, and in turn modulating the activity of neurons, and possibly vasculature.

Three speakers from preclinical and clinical research field will shed light on the proposed topic. This webinar provides an opportunity to gain expertise in the field of natural and synthetic cannabinoids by an overview of the detrimental effects of natural cannabinoids and increased risk of psychiatric disorders in humans (Marta Di Forti), and neuropsychiatric sequelae of their toxicity in adolescents (Yasmin Hurd), and up-to-date information of the pharmacological and toxicological properties of synthetic cannabinoids, as estimated by preclinical models of drug dependence (Maria Antonietta De Luca).

In this one-hour long webinar, we will discuss key points of poster preparation and presentation, including where to start, how to visualize your ideas using text and figures, how to present to different audiences, how to handle questions and discussions at your poster, and how to follow up with your audience.

Echolocation enables blind individuals to perceive and navigate their environment by emitting clicks and interpreting their returning echoes. While expert blind echolocators demonstrate remarkable spatial accuracy, the behavioral and neural mechanisms by which spatial echoacoustic cues are combined across repeated samples remain less explored. Here, we investigated the temporal dynamics of spatial information processing in human click-based echolocation using EEG. Blind expert echolocators (n=4, all males) and novice sighted participants (n=21, 12 males) localized virtual spatialized echoes derived from realistic synthesized mouth clicks, presented in trains of 2–11 clicks. Behavioral results showed that blind expert echolocators significantly outperformed sighted controls in spatial localization. For these experts, localization thresholds decreased as the number of clicks increased, a pattern consistent with cumulative integration of spatial information across repeated samples. EEG decoding analyses revea...