Ventral tegmental area GABA neurons mediate stress-induced blunted reward-seeking in mice.

Decreased pleasure-seeking (anhedonia) forms a core symptom of depression. Stressful experiences precipitate depression and disrupt reward-seeking, but it remains unclear how stress causes anhedonia. We recorded simultaneous neural activity across limbic brain areas as mice underwent stress and discovered a stress-induced 4 Hz oscillation in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) that predicts the degree of subsequent blunted reward-seeking.

Internally Generated Predictions Enhance Neural and Behavioral Detection of Sensory Stimuli in an Electric Fish.

Studies of cerebellum-like circuits in fish have demonstrated that synaptic plasticity shapes the motor corollary discharge responses of granule cells into highly-specific predictions of self-generated sensory input. However, the functional significance of such predictions, known as negative images, has not been directly tested. Here we provide evidence for improvements in neural coding and behavioral detection of prey-like stimuli due to negative images.

A cerebellum-like circuit in the auditory system cancels responses to self-generated sounds.

The dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) integrates auditory nerve input with a diverse array of sensory and motor signals processed in circuitry similar to that of the cerebellum. Yet how the DCN contributes to early auditory processing has been a longstanding puzzle. Using electrophysiological recordings in mice during licking behavior, we show that DCN neurons are largely unaffected by self-generated sounds while remaining sensitive to external acoustic stimuli.

In search of the structure of human olfactory space.

We analyze the responses of human observers to an ensemble of monomolecular odorants. Each odorant is characterized by a set of 146 perceptual descriptors obtained from a database of odor character profiles. Each odorant is therefore represented by a point in a highly multidimensional sensory space.