Perinatal Western-style diet exposure associated with decreased microglial counts throughout the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus in Japanese macaques.

Perinatal exposure to a high-fat, high-sugar Western-style diet (WSD) is associated with altered neural circuitry in the melanocortin system. This association may have an underlying inflammatory component, as consumption of a WSD during pregnancy can lead to an elevated inflammatory environment. Our group previously demonstrated that prenatal WSD exposure was associated with increased markers of inflammation in the placenta and fetal hypothalamus in Japanese macaques.

Perinatal Western-style diet alters serotonergic neurons in the macaque raphe nuclei.

Introduction: The neurotransmitter serotonin is a key regulator of neurotransmission, mood, and behavior and is essential in neurodevelopment. Dysfunction in this important neurotransmitter system is connected to behavioral disorders such as depression and anxiety. We have previously shown that the developing serotonin system is sensitive to perinatal exposure to Western-style diet (WSD).

Maternal Interleukin-6 Is Associated With Macaque Offspring Amygdala Development and Behavior.

Human and animal cross-sectional studies have shown that maternal levels of the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) may compromise brain phenotypes assessed at single time points. However, how maternal IL-6 associates with the trajectory of brain development remains unclear. We investigated whether maternal IL-6 levels during pregnancy relate to offspring amygdala volume development and anxiety-like behavior in Japanese macaques.

Scale (in)variance in a unified diffusion model of decision making and timing.

Weber's law is the canonical scale-invariance law in psychology: when the intensities of 2 stimuli are scaled by any value k, the just-noticeable-difference between them also scales by k. A diffusion model that approximates a spike-counting process accounts for Weber's law (Link, 1992), but there exist surprising corollaries of this account that have not yet been described or tested. We show that (a) this spike-counting diffusion model predicts time-scale invariant decision time distributions in perceptual decision making, and time-scale invariant response time (RT) distributions in interval timing; (b) for 2-choice perceptual decisions, the model predicts equal accuracy but faster responding for stimulus pairs with equally scaled-up intensities; (c) the coefficient of variation (CV) of decision times should remain constant across average intensity scales, but should otherwise decrease as a specific function of stimulus discriminability and speed-accuracy trade-off; and (d) for timing tasks, RT CVs should be constant for all durations, and RT skewness should always equal 3 times the CV.

Speed accuracy trade-off under response deadlines.

Perceptual decision making has been successfully modeled as a process of evidence accumulation up to a threshold. In order to maximize the rewards earned for correct responses in tasks with response deadlines, participants should collapse decision thresholds dynamically during each trial so that a decision is reached before the deadline. This strategy ensures on-time responding, though at the cost of reduced accuracy, since slower decisions are based on lower thresholds and less net evidence later in a trial (compared to a constant threshold).