Human olfactory function is important for a myriad of behaviors, including food seeking, social cognition, memory, emotional regulation, and detecting environmental threats. In animal models, particularly dense olfactory inputs have been shown to target orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region involved in multimodal sensory integration, reward coding, and flexibly guiding our...
Aging is the greatest known risk factor for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD); however, the molecular mechanisms underlying aging and how it can initiate and or exacerbate AD, is still unknown. Epigenetic regulation has been widely accepted to play an essential role in aging or AD-related processes; however, whether dysregulations of histone...
Voltage-gated potassium (KV) currents play a crucial role in shaping and controlling the firing patterns that serve as the fundamental basis for the differential signal processing from the ear to the auditory cortex, with distinct firing patterns observed with high- and low-frequency phenotypes. This is an interesting phenomenon, in the...
The retina detects light, processes the visual signal, and sends a complex set of parallel information channels to the brain via a functionally diverse set of retinal ganglion cells types. This manuscript examines these retinal ganglion cell types, the visual features they encode, and the computational mechanisms leading to their...
Simple sensorimotor tasks, such as lifting a cup or balancing a tray, requires not only controlled motor output, but also the ability to accurately perceive sensory information. After a hemiparetic stroke, individuals often experience sensory deficits in addition to motor impairments. However, research on the extent of changes in sensory...
Findings in both humans and animal models have associated the hippocampal theta oscillation with hippocampal memory function. In animal models, previous research supports that the theta oscillation contributes to memory via phase-dependent changes in hippocampal network connectivity, wherein memory encoding versus retrieval are optimized at different phases of the theta...
Cholinergic modulation of the brain cortex is critical for cognitive processes, and altered cholinergic modulation of the prefrontal cortex is emerging as an important mechanism of neuropathic pain. Despite the known sex differences in pain prevalence and perception, the precise nature of the mechanisms responsible for sexual dimorphism in chronic...
The answer to the question “Why do we sleep?” lies in understanding the biological underpinnings of homeostatic drive to sleep. Wakefulness is correlated with numerous changes in brain activity, structure and gene/protein expression that re-normalize following sleep however which of these elements is sufficient to cause sleep drive and how...
Perturbations to the physiology or impairments in the formation of synapses within the cochlea, specifically the ribbon synapses, result in decreased sensitivity to auditory stimuli. In example, prolonged exposure to moderately intense auditory stimuli, like power tools, can result in the swelling of nerve terminals, retraction of the postsynaptic membrane,...
Affect represents a major domain of human consciousness, consisting of a complex group of psychophysiological processes to drive human behavior. Many genetic and environmental factors may cause dysregulation of affective states, resulting in disorders that severely disrupt normal cognitive function and diminish the quality of life. Transitions among affective states...
The current view in neuroscience holds that the brain, together with its sensory and motor structures and the environment, form a closed-loop system – a sensorimotor loop – in which the brain receives information from the environment and converts it into a motor response while simultaneously making predictions about future...
Research over the past several decades has revealed that memory reactivation in sleep contributes to the formation of long-lasting memories. Among the most recent developments in this field is the widespread use of the technique of targeted memory reactivation (TMR), which allows researchers to induce reactivation of specific memories during...
Electrical spinal cord stimulation is an emerging treatment for spinal cord injury that can improve walking and bladder control, among many other functions. While the anatomical location of the motor pools for muscles involved in locomotion in the lumbosacral cord has been identified, the map of the functional output of...
Persons with spinal cord injuries can use state-of-the-art brain-computer interfaces to control robotic arms. Despite this high-tech solution, their movements are slow and imprecise, much like those made by individuals who have lost proprioception, the sense of body position and movement. Intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) used to reactivate neural circuits in...
Over the course of disease progression, half of adults with type II diabetes also develop diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN), peripheral nerve damage precipitated by the downstream metabolic effects of hyperglycemia, insulin resistance, and dyslipidemia. This multifactorial pathogenesis of DPN leads to various structural and physiological changes within the nerve, ultimately...
The retina does not act as a simple camera, rather visual information goes through multiple layers of processing before it reaches the brain. Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are the output neurons of the retina and process visual information in the retina and then project into the brain. There are over...
Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent, recurrent, and major public health problems. Decades of research has uncovered associations between symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression and abnormal neural activation across executive control-, threat-, and reward-related networks. Recent studies have developed a hierarchical symptom structure of anxiety and depression termed the...
Numerous insights into the sensorimotor systems that guide the control of voice have been garnered by observing how the system responds to manipulations of its auditory feedback. However, current approaches may be limited in the exploration of more complex parameters of volitional and adaptive voice control due to their limited...
The cerebellar cortical system is an extensively studied circuit which is critical for motor learning. While multiple monoamines, such as norepinephrine and serotonin, modulate cerebellar cortical output, the mechanistic details of dopaminergic signaling in the cerebellum remain poorly understood. Additionally, neuronal cell types residing within the cerebellum remain relatively under-characterized....
Background: The way in which one perceives their visual world (i.e., bottom-up visual perception) and what one pays attention to in their surroundings (i.e., top-down attention), are critical to uncovering underlying thoughts and cognitions, and impact how one operates in the social world. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a...