Recently a study from Ryszard Maleszka’s Lab demonstrates that DNA methylation does play a role in the acquisition of memory and mediates the resistance of this memory to extinction in honeybees (Lockett et al 2010). Now the group of Paul Szyszka in Konstanz provides additional information about the role of DNA methylation in the formation […]
Archiv der Kategorie 'Behavior'
Individual differences in skilled adult readers reveal dissociable patterns of neural activity associated with component processes of reading
To successfully read and understand words one has to master several complex processes. A competent reader not only needs to recognize single letters, he or she must also have knowledge about how these letters are legally combined to larger orthographic units (orthographic processing), how to map these units to sounds (phonological processing) and to associate […]
Dopaminergic Modulation of Sucrose Acceptance Behavior in Drosophila
Prof. Jochen Pflüger will present the following paper on Monday (17/04): Marella, S., Mann, K., & Scott, K. (2012). Dopaminergic Modulation of Sucrose Acceptance Behavior in Drosophila Neuron, 73 (5), 941-950 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.12.032
The generation of a memory trace?
Have you seen the movie Inception? If not you should. It is all about a group of people high jacking the dreams of company bosses to steal useful information from their memory to sell them to their rivals. Anyway the Holy Grail of these “being in other peoples head and manipulating things” – trips is […]
Coincident firing of neurons can specify a synapse for later modulation
Yet another fascinating Nature article from the research group around Gilles Laurent. This article is built around the mechanisms underlying associative learning and plasticity in the mushroom bodies in insects. The area is known to be crucial for associative learning of odors and contains up to hundreds of thousands of neurons called Kenyon cells. Here […]
Perceptual decision making in less than 30 milliseconds
Perceptual decision making is formalized as the accumulation of (noisy) sensory evidence until a decision threshold is crossed. Much understanding has been gained from studies of monkey neurophysiology and human neuroimaging as well as by computational modeling but there are still fascinating open questions about mechanisms of perceptual decision making. Perceptual decisions can be made […]
Specific erasure of fear memory by disrupting reconsolidation
Merel Kindt and her team demonstrated that fear memory can be deleted in humans (Kindt et al. 2009). This was achieved by the oral administration of β-adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol before the reactivation of memory. They propose that their strategy of disrupting the (re-) stabilization of a memory after retrieval (reconsolidation) could pave the way […]
The Role of experience in flight behaviour of Drosophila
This study illustrates the requirement of training and exercise in executing successful fine motor skills in the invertebrates.Fruit fly Drosophila groups reared and grown in two different fly chambers ,one allows free flight movement and other restricted flight movement were tested for various flight kinematics in free flight arena and tethered flight simulator.Overall performance of […]
Critical role for protein kinase A in the acquisition of gregarious behavior in the desert locust
Posted on behalf of Hans-Joachim Pflüger: In the article by Ott et al. the role of two protein kinases (PK) in the population density dependent transition from solitarious to gregarious animals is investigated. Only gregarious locusts form large swarms that are harmful for agriculture. The foraging gene product, a cGMP-dependent PK (PKG), implicated in foraging, […]
Reading the mind’s eye: Online detection of visuo-spatial working memory and visual imagery in the inferior temporal lobe
Posted on behalf of Jaime Martinez: The authors of the present work studied the extent to which visual brain regions participate in non-sensory cognitive processes of visual representation. To this end, they evaluated the role of ventral visual pathway areas in visual imagery and working memory by analyzing intracerebral EEG recordings from the left inferior […]
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