Article
Neurosciences
Omar A. Qureshi, Jessica Leake, Andrew J. Delaney, Simon Killcross, R. Frederick Westbrook, Nathan M. Holmes
Summary: The study investigated how danger affects the consolidation of neutral information in the perirhinal cortex (PRh) and basolateral amygdala complex (BLA) of male and female rats. The findings revealed that when a shocked context exposure follows the sensory preconditioning session, the consolidation of the association between the auditory and visual stimuli (S2-S1) shifts from the PRh to the BLA. This shift is influenced by the encoding processes of the S2-S1 pairings. The study also found that the BLA encodes the initial S2-S1 pairing, while the PRh encodes the later pairings. In contrast, when a context alone exposure follows the sensory preconditioning session, the BLA-dependent memory trace of the early pairings decays while the PRh-dependent trace of the later pairings consolidates. However, in the presence of a shocked context exposure, the PRh-dependent memory trace of the later pairings is suppressed, and the BLA-dependent trace of the initial pairings consolidates.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Keisuke Tsunoda, Akinori Y. Sato, Ryo Mizuyama, Satoshi Shimegi
Summary: Pharmacological blockade of beta-AR in the primary visual cortex (V1) improves perceptual visual detectability by enhancing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of neuronal activity.
PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY
(2021)
Review
Behavioral Sciences
Nathan M. Holmes, Justine P. Fam, Kelly J. Clemens, Vincent Laurent, R. Fred Westbrook
Summary: This paper reviews the neural substrates of sensory preconditioning and second-order conditioning and discusses the similarities and differences in these conditioning protocols, as well as their contribution to our understanding of how the brain encodes and retrieves information.
NEUROSCIENCE AND BIOBEHAVIORAL REVIEWS
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Andrew M. Meier, Quanxin Wang, Weiqing Ji, Jehan Ganachaud, Andreas Burkhalter
Summary: The study showed that the postrhinal area in mice integrates visual information from various cortical areas and influences landmark navigation through connections with the amygdala, especially involving emotional input. Different modules within the postrhinal area respond to inputs differently, ultimately contributing to the construction of spatial maps for navigation.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Tyler Bonnen, L. K. Daniel Yamins, D. Anthony Wagner
Summary: The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is involved in memory-related behaviors, while its role in perceptual processing, particularly the involvement of the perirhinal cortex (PRC), has been a subject of debate. By utilizing a deep learning framework to simulate visual behaviors supported by the ventral visual stream (VVS) without PRC, the study found similarities between VVS-modeled and PRC-lesioned behaviors, but both were outperformed by participants with an intact PRC. This research resolves decades of inconsistent findings by situating lesion, electrophysiological, and behavioral results within a shared computational framework.
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Martina Canatelli-Mallat, Priscila Chiavellini, Marianne Lehmann, Rodolfo Gustavo Goya, Gustavo Ramon Morel
Summary: Ageing is associated with impaired recognition memory. This study aimed to evaluate the ability of female rats at different ages to retain long-term recognition memory. The results showed that spatial discrimination capacity could be affected earlier than feature discrimination capacity. Furthermore, neurogenesis depletion in the Dentate Gyrus and microglial disruption in the perirhinal cortex were associated with memory deficits.
BEHAVIOURAL BRAIN RESEARCH
(2022)
Editorial Material
Neurosciences
Jeremiah K. Morrow, Vincent D. Costa
Summary: The dynamics of neurons in primate anterior cingulate cortex and putamen can indicate the discovery of a correct policy and confidence in executing decisions under that policy.
Article
Neurosciences
J. F. Morici, G. Cicuttin, A. Silva, F. T. Gallo, M. Miranda, M. Belluscio, C. Zold, P. Bekinschtein, N. V. Weisstaub
Summary: The 5-HT2a receptor in the medial prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in regulating memory retrieval and behavioral response by controlling neuronal activation in the perirhinal cortex.
Article
Psychology, Biological
Nicola Sambuco
Summary: Recent findings questioned the replicability of fMRI in affective processing studies, suggesting that poor replicability may be due to a lack of emotional engagement. The current study tested the replicability of emotional enhancement using a large sample size, showing that replicability increased with increasing sample size. Importantly, even with relatively small samples, fMRI replicability during emotional compared to neutral scene viewing was good to excellent, indicating the importance of successful emotional engagement in task-related brain regions.
Article
Neurosciences
Maria Garcia-Bonilla, Arjun Nair, Jason Moore, Leandro Castaneyra-Ruiz, Sarah H. Zwick, Ryan N. Dilger, Stephen A. Fleming, Rebecca K. Golden, Michael R. Talcott, Albert M. Isaacs, David D. Limbrick Jr, James P. McAllister II
Summary: This study found that acquired hydrocephalus caused morphological alterations, reduced neurogenesis, and increased reactive astrocytosis in the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex.
EXPERIMENTAL NEUROLOGY
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Qianli Yang, Edgar Walker, R. James Cotton, Andreas S. Tolias, Xaq Pitkow
Summary: Sensory data about most natural task-relevant variables are entangled with task-irrelevant nuisance variables. The authors present a theoretical framework for quantifying how the brain uses or decodes its nonlinear information which indicates near-optimal nonlinear decoding.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Kenji W. Koyano, Elena M. Esch, Julie J. Hong, Elena N. Waidmann, Haitao Wu, David A. Leopold
Summary: The primate brain has the ability to learn and remember new visual stimuli, such as faces and objects. Neurons in the macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex mark the familiarity of visual stimuli through a decrease in spiking rate. By studying neurons in the anterior medial (AM) face patch during weeks of familiarization with face images, we found that most neurons exhibited a gradual decline in their late-phase visual responses. Each neuron's rate of plasticity varied over time, determined by the number of days of exposure rather than the total number of presentations. We propose that the sequential recruitment of neurons with experience-modified responses serves as an internal and graded measure of familiarity strength, which is crucial for visual recognition.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Katherine N. Mueller, Mary C. Carter, Jeevun A. Kansupada, Carlos R. Ponce
Summary: Primates have the ability to recognize features in various types of images, and this ability requires a comprehensive computational explanation. Researchers used machine learning algorithms to create highly activating prototype images that represent visual patterns stored by neurons. Monkeys were found to classify prototypes from visual cortex neurons as conspecifics more often than random generator images and prototypes from primary visual cortex, and their choices were partially predicted by convolutional neural networks.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Spencer J. J. Waters, Benjamin M. M. Basile, Elisabeth A. A. Murray
Summary: The relative contributions of the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex to visual item recognition and location memory are still disputed. A meta-analysis of 26 publications on nonhuman primates with selective neurotoxic lesions of the hippocampus or perirhinal cortex revealed that the perirhinal cortex plays a larger role in visual item recognition, while the hippocampus mainly contributes to spatial navigation. Despite some inconsistencies, there is a trend of greater impairment with greater lesion extent, except for a paradoxical finding that more extensive hippocampal lesions predicted smaller impairments on tests of visual item recognition.
Article
Neurosciences
John Read, Emma Delhaye, Jacques Sougne
Summary: In this study, two computational models combining deep learning and Hebbian learning rule were designed to investigate familiarity. The results showed that the anti-Hebbian model matched human behavioral data, while the Hebbian model failed to fit the data under large training set sizes. These findings reveal the distinction between absolute and relative familiarity.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Paul James Banks, Amelia Caroline Burroughs, Gareth Robert Isaac Barker, Jon Thomas Brown, Elizabeth Clea Warburton, Zafar Iqbal Bashir
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2015)
Article
Neurosciences
Shobbir Hussain, Zafar I. Bashir
FRONTIERS IN CELLULAR NEUROSCIENCE
(2015)
Article
Neurosciences
Stephen Fitzjohn, Zafar Bashir, Paul Farrow
CURRENT NEUROPHARMACOLOGY
(2016)
Article
Neurosciences
Gareth R. I. Barker, Paul J. Banks, Hannah Scott, G. Scott Ralph, Kyriacos A. Mitrophanous, Liang-Fong Wong, Zafar I. Bashir, James B. Uney, E. Clea Warburton
NATURE NEUROSCIENCE
(2017)
Article
Pharmacology & Pharmacy
D. Mango, E. Braksator, G. Battaglia, S. Marcelli, N. B. Mercuri, M. Feligioni, F. Nicoletti, Z. I. Bashir, R. Nistico
PHARMACOLOGICAL RESEARCH
(2017)
Article
Cell Biology
Marie H. Sabec, Susan Wonnacott, E. Clea Warburton, Zafar I. Bashir
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
J. Pickford, R. Apps, Z. I. Bashir
NEUROCHEMICAL RESEARCH
(2019)
Review
Clinical Neurology
Syed Muhammad Usman, Shehzad Khalid, Rizwan Akhtar, Zuner Bortolotto, Zafar Bashir, Haiyang Qiu
SEIZURE-EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF EPILEPSY
(2019)
Review
Neurosciences
Paul J. Banks, Zafar Bashir
Summary: This review focuses on the roles played by N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) on pyramidal neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex, including their frequency-dependent effects on ongoing synaptic transmission, plasticity, and contribution to plasticity induced by synchronous activation of two separate inputs to the mPFC.
Article
Biology
Kirsty J. McMillan, Paul J. Banks, Francesca L. N. Hellel, Ruth E. Carmichael, Thomas Clairfeuille, Ashley J. Evans, Kate J. Heesom, Philip Lewis, Brett M. Collins, Zafar Bashir, Jeremy M. Henley, Kevin A. Wilkinson, Peter J. Cullen
Summary: SNX27 is associated with various neuropathologies by sorting integral proteins to the synaptic surface, particularly AMPA receptors. Through regulating the endosomal sorting of LRFN2, SNX27 indirectly controls AMPA receptor-mediated synaptic transmission and plasticity, shedding light on their perturbed functions in neurological conditions.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Jithin D. Nair, Ellen Braksator, Busra P. Yucel, Alexandra Fletcher-Jones, Richard Seager, Jack R. Mellor, Zafar Bashir, Kevin A. Wilkinson, Jeremy M. Henley
Summary: The study found that sustained activation of GluK2 subunit-containing kainate receptors leads to AMPAR endocytosis and induces LTD in hippocampal neurons. In acute hippocampal slices, kainate application causes a significant loss of GluA2-containing AMPARs from synapses and long-lasting depression of AMPAR excitatory postsynaptic currents in CA1. These results demonstrate that kainate receptors can bidirectionally regulate synaptic AMPARs and synaptic plasticity via different signaling pathways.
Article
Neurosciences
Harry George, Zafar I. Bashir, Shobbir Hussain
Summary: Biallelic loss-of-function NSUN2 mutations have been associated with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC), and NSun2-deficiency can cause intellectually disability disorder syndrome, which can sometimes display autistic behavior. The study suggests that protein synthesis-dependent synaptic plasticity dysregulation may be a mechanism associated with autism phenotypes.
NEUROBIOLOGY OF DISEASE
(2022)
Review
Neurosciences
Cristiana I. Iosif, Zafar Bashir, Richard Apps, Jasmine Pickford
Summary: The cerebellum plays a role in various aspects of food consumption, including homeostatic, motor, rewarding, and affective aspects. Prediction and feedback are important in eating, and cerebellar learning involves comparing expected outcomes to sensory feedback.
Article
Neurosciences
Giorgia Savalli, Zafar I. Bashir, E. Clea Warburton
Article
Neurosciences
Michael D. Laing, Zafar I. Bashir
Article
Neurosciences
Yang He, Jun Tang, Meng Zhang, Junjie Ying, Dezhi Mu
Summary: This study investigated the protective effects and mechanisms of human placenta derived mesenchymal stem cells (hPMSCs) transplantation in a rat model of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). The results showed that hPMSCs transplantation reduced apoptosis and improved long-term neurological prognosis. Furthermore, the downregulation of Sema 3A/NRP-1 expression and activation of the PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway played a key role in the protective effects of hPMSCs.
Article
Neurosciences
Emily L. Isenstein, Edward G. Freedman, Jiayi Xu, Ian A. DeAndrea-Lazarus, John J. Foxe
Summary: This study evaluated electrophysiological discrimination of parametric somatosensory stimuli in healthy young adults to understand how the brain processes the duration of tactile information. The results showed that participants did not electrophysiologically discriminate between 100 and 115 ms, but they exhibited distinct electrophysiological responses when the deviant stimuli were 130, 145, and 160 ms. These findings contribute to a better understanding of tactile sensitivity in different clinical conditions.
Article
Neurosciences
Juliana R. Souza, Ludmila Lima-Silveira, Daniela Accorsi-Mendonca, Benedito H. Machado
Summary: This study demonstrates that A2A receptors play a crucial role in modulating synaptic transmission in the NTS neurons and are required for the enhancement of glutamatergic transmission observed under short-term sustained hypoxia conditions.
Article
Neurosciences
Miki Hashizume, Rina Ito, Rie Suge, Yasushi Hojo, Gen Murakami, Takayuki Murakoshi
Summary: The basolateral amygdaloid complex (BLA) is closely involved in the formation of emotional memories, including both aversive memory and contextual fear memory. Acute sleep deprivation (SD) disrupts the acquisition of tone-associated fear memory in juvenile rats, but has no significant effect on contextual fear memory. Slow network oscillation in the amygdala contributes to the formation of amygdala-dependent fear memory in relation to sleep.
Article
Neurosciences
Qunxian Wang, Shipeng Guo, Dongjie Hu, Xiangjun Dong, Zijun Meng, Yanshuang Jiang, Zijuan Feng, Weihui Zhou, Weihong Song
Summary: GSDME plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease by regulating the switch from apoptosis to pyroptosis and participating in neuroinflammatory response. Knockdown of GSDME has been shown to improve cognitive impairments, indicating that GSDME could be a therapeutic target for Alzheimer's disease.
