The mapping of eye-specific, geniculocortical inputs to primary visual cortex (V1) is highly sensitive to the balance of correlated activity between the two eyes during a restricted postnatal critical period for ocular ...

Possessing the ability to noninvasively elicit brain circuit activity yields immense experimental and therapeutic power. Most currently employed neurostimulation methods rely on the somewhat invasive use of stimulating ...

What happens when the brain awaits a signal of uncertain arrival time, as when a sprinter waits for the starting pistol? And what happens just after the starting pistol fires? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging ...

Extracellular calcium is critical for many neural functions, including neurotransmission, cell adhesion, and neural plasticity. Experiments have shown that normal neural activity is associated with changes in extracellular ...

Access to limited-capacity neural systems of cognitive control must be restricted to the most relevant information. How the brain identifies and selects items for preferential processing is not fully understood. Anatomical ...

Reinforcement learning models now provide principled guides for a wide range of reward learning experiments in animals and humans. One key learning (error) signal in these models is experiential and reports ongoing temporal ...

Certain classes of stimuli, such as food and drugs, are highly effective in activating reward regions. We show in humans that activity in these regions can be modulated by the predictability of the sequenced delivery of ...

Making sequential decisions to harvest rewards is a notoriously difficult problem. One difficulty is that the real world is not stationary and the reward expected from a contemplated action may depend in complex ways on ...

A remarkable amount of our current knowledge of mechanisms underlying experience-dependent plasticity during cortical development comes from study of the mammalian visual cortex. Recent advances in high-resolution cellular ...

Background: Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions. Recent studies have revealed that alexithymia is associated with less activation of the ...