Spatial learning in male and female Long-Evans rats.
Male and female Long-Evans rats were tested in the Morris water maze at 6 months of age. A place training procedure, in which rats learned the position of a camouflaged platform, was followed by cue training, in which rats escaped to a visible platform. No sex difference was found in place learning ability. Search accuracy on probe trials, when the platform was unavailable, was also equivalent for the male and female groups. These results contrast with previous studies of rodents at younger ages, which have reported a male advantage in spatial learning. It is suggested that the age at which rats are assessed may be an impo...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - April 15, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Remembering David Bucci.
In the year of 2021, we are honoring David J. Bucci, our beloved and respected colleague, who died at the age of 50 in 2019. In the Special Section entitled Remembering David Bucci, we reprint 6 of the 29 articles that Dave published in Behavioral Neuroscience beginning with the first one in 1995. Of the 29 articles, these 6 were chosen in an attempt to span Dave’s research interests and to highlight a few of his many collaborators and students. These articles are meant to represent his interests in the functions of the hippocampus, surrounding brain regions, and beyond, particularly with regard to memory, attention, and...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - April 15, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
A new team is on the field.
In this article, the incoming editor of Behavioral Neuroscience introduces himself and his editorial team, and outlines his goals for the journal through the next 6 years. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Behavioral Neuroscience)
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - April 15, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Satiety does not affect neuroaffective electrophysiological responses to food-related or emotional visual cues.
Continuing to eat even when full leads to excessive calorie consumption and obesity. Thus, understanding brain responses to food cues when satiated has important implications for weight control interventions. We used the late positive potential (LPP, a component of the event-related potentials (ERP) indexing motivational relevance) to determine the extent to which satiety affects brain responses to images of highly palatable foods (high-fat, high-sugar), high and low motivationally relevant (pleasant, unpleasant) and neutral stimuli in a sample of obese (body mass index [BMI] ≥ 30 kg/m2) and lean (BMI (Source: Behavioral Neuroscience)
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - April 12, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
The stressed orbitofrontal cortex.
Stressor exposure causes dendritic remodeling on excitatory neurons in multiple regions of the brain, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Additionally, stressor and exogenous stress hormone exposure impair cognitive functions that are dependent on the OFC. For this Special Issue on the OFC, we summarize current literature regarding how stress—prenatal, postnatal, and even inter-generational—affects OFC neuron structure in rodents. We discuss dendrite structure, dendritic spines, and gene expression. We aim to provide a focused resource for those interested in how stressors impact this heterogeneous brain region. ...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 25, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Pharmacological inhibition of BKCa channels induces a specific social deficit in adult C57BL6/J mice.
Genetic variants in large conductance voltage and calcium sensitive potassium (BKCa) channels have associations with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, fragile X syndrome, and intellectual disability. In the case of fragile X syndrome, early preclinical studies suggest that BKCa channels may be a promising treatment target for neurodevelopmental disorders. While BKCa channel dysfunction has been investigated within the context of fragile X syndrome, it is unknown whether interference with BKCa channel function is inductive for deficits in behavioral domains relevant to neurodevelopmental disorde...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 18, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
What are grid-like responses doing in the orbitofrontal cortex?
In 2005, the Moser group identified a new type of cell in the entorhinal cortex (ERC): the grid cell (Hafting, Nature, 436, 2005, pp. 801–806). A landmark series of studies from these investigators showed that grid cells support spatial navigation by encoding position, direction as well as distance information, and they subsequently found grid cells in pre- and para-subiculum areas adjacent to the ERC (Boccara, Nature Neuroscience, 13, 2010, pp. 987–994). Fast forward to 2010, when some clever investigators developed fMRI analysis methods to document grid-like responses in the human ERC (Doeller, Nature, 463, 2010, pp....
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 18, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
To be specific: The role of orbitofrontal cortex in signaling reward identity.
The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a prominent role in signaling reward expectations. Two important features of rewards are their value (how good they are) and their specific identity (what they are). Whereas research on OFC has traditionally focused on reward value, recent findings point toward a pivotal role of reward identity in understanding OFC signaling and its contribution to behavior. Here, we review work in rodents, nonhuman primates, and humans on how the OFC represents expectations about the identity of rewards, and how these signals contribute to outcome-guided behavior. Moreover, we summarize recent findings...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 18, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Viewing orbitofrontal cortex contributions to decision-making through the lens of object recognition.
Decision neuroscience research has consistently implicated orbitofrontal and adjacent ventromedial prefrontal cortex in value-based decision-making. These areas are thought to reflect subjective value, a generic indicator of the personal motivational relevance of different options that allows them to be compared on a common scale. There are a number of unanswered questions arising from this model. We review findings from studies in patients with focal damage to the ventral frontal lobe that led us to reconsider how decision options are evaluated, applying perspectives from research on object recognition in the ventral visu...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 18, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Sensitivity to amphetamine in prepulse inhibition response requires a mature medial prefrontal cortex.
This study was aimed to analyze the relationship between the adult medial prefrontal cortex (mPfc) and dopaminergic involvement in PPI throughout the life span. Specifically, the present experiment analyzed the effect of the administration of dopaminergic agonist amphetamine on PPI in two different age periods in Wistar rats: postnatal day (PND) 28 and PND 70. In this last period, we also explored the relationship between PPI response and amphetamine effects after mPfc lesion. The results showed that PPI was expressed in all groups and periods; however, amphetamine only modulated this effect during adulthood. We also found...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 18, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Factors influencing developmental differences in retention of Pavlovian fear conditioning.
Modern nonhuman animal research on the rapid forgetting of memories formed early in life—often termed “infantile amnesia”—has focused on neurobiological changes occurring between learning and retention testing to explain age differences in memory. Developmental differences in initial learning have received less attention as a contributing factor to infantile amnesia effects. The present study identifies conditions under which associative learning and memory are comparable between pre and postweaning rats across multiple training–testing intervals. Postnatal day (P) 17–18 or P24–25 littermates were trained wit...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 4, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
NMDA lesions in the prefrontal cortex delay the onset of maternal, but not infanticidal behavior in pup-naïve adult mice (C57BL/6).
While most pup-naïve adult female mice can display, or be induced (by repeated exposure to pups) to display parental behavior rapidly, adult males are infanticidal or nonparental. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) participates in attentional selection, decision-making, behavioral flexibility, and planning that may be critical in the rapid display of parental or infanticidal behavior. We investigated if NMDA-induced lesions in the mPFC (targeting prelimbic cortex) inhibited maternal or infanticidal behavior in pup-naïve adult female and male mice (C57BL/6), respectively. All Control females displayed full maternal behav...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 4, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Intrahippocampal blockade of nicotinic or muscarinic receptors fails to impair nonnavigational spatial memory in macaques.
Cholinergic neurotransmission within the hippocampus has long been suggested to play a pivotal role in memory processing, based partly on the assumption that the well-established amnestic effects of systemic cholinergic receptor blockade are mediated by the hippocampus. However, experimental evidence suggests that this may not be the case; a growing number of studies employing selective lesion or pharmacological approaches to disrupt cholinergic transmission within the hippocampus have failed to find robust deficits in either learning or memory, primarily in rodent models. Here, we evaluated the contribution of nicotinic a...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - February 25, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Amygdala central nucleus modulation of cerebellar learning in female rats.
Previous studies found that inactivation of the central amygdala (CeA) severely impaired acquisition of cerebellum-dependent delay eye-blink conditioning (EBC) in male rats and rabbits. Sex differences in EBC and the effects of stress on EBC have been reported and might be related to sex differences in amygdala modulation of cerebellar learning. The current study examined the effects of CeA inactivation with muscimol on acquisition and retention of EBC in female rats. Like male rats, CeA inactivation in female rats severely impaired EBC acquisition and retention. Comparison of the female data with previously published data...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - February 25, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Intracerebellar infusion of an mGluR1/5 agonist enhances eyeblink conditioning.
Cerebellar metabotropic glutamate receptor 1 (mGluR1) expressed by Purkinje cells may play an important role in learning-related cerebellar plasticity. Eyeblink conditioning (EBC) is a well-studied form of Pavlovian learning that engages discrete areas of cerebellar cortex and deep cerebellar nuclei. EBC is impaired in mGluR1 knockout mice. Here, we show that infusion of the mGluR1/5 agonist DHPG into the lobulus simplex region of cerebellar cortex facilitates EBC in rats. Infusion was made prior to Sessions 1 and 2 of EBC but the facilitatory effects persisted throughout subsequent, noninfusion sessions. The facilitatory ...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - February 25, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
