As the knowledge base in neuroscience continues to expand, educators need timely resources to engage their students.

Learning to solve a new problem involves identifying the operating rules, which can be accelerated if known rules generalize in the new context. We ask how prior experience affects learning a new rule that is distinct from known rules. We examined how rats learned a new spatial navigation task after having previously learned tasks with different navigation rules. The new task differed from the previous tasks in spatial layout and navigation rule. We found that experience history did not impact overall performance. However, by examining navigation choice sequences in the new task, we found experience-dependent differences in exploration patterns during early stages of learning, as well as differences in the types of errors made during stable performance. The differences were consistent with the animals adopting experience-dependent memory strategies to discover and implement the new rule. Our results indicate prior experience shapes the strategies for solving novel problems, and the impact of prior experien...

As neuroscientists try to understand the dynamics of both large networks of neurons and single cells, new methods to monitor neuronal activity are being developed.

The FENS-SfN Summer School on Neurodevelopmental Psychiatric Disorders took place June 22-28, 2014, in in Bertinoro, Italy. Watch an interview with the scientific organizers of the FENS-SfN Summer School 2014 on Neurodevelopmental Psychiatric Disorders.

Far from being an extra or time-permitting task, mentoring is as essential to a faculty member’s success as teaching, research, and publication.

Mara Dierssen is a senior scientist at the Centre for Biomedical Research on Rare Diseases and the president of the Spanish Society for Neuroscience. She shares her insight about the challenges women face in neuroscience from her experience working and advancing in the field, and she offers advice to other women pursuing a career in neuroscience.