Deficiency Impacts Hippocampal CA1 Neuronal Excitability, Dendritic Architecture, and Affects Spatial Learning.

G-protein-coupled receptor 158 () is highly expressed in striatum, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. It gained attention as it was implicated in physiological responses to stress and depression. Recently, has been shown to act as a pathway-specific synaptic organizer in the hippocampus, required for proper mossy fiber-CA3 neurocircuitry establishment, structure, and function.

Combined cellomics and proteomics analysis reveals shared neuronal morphology and molecular pathway phenotypes for multiple schizophrenia risk genes.

An enigma in studies of neuropsychiatric disorders is how to translate polygenic risk into disease biology. For schizophrenia, where > 145 significant GWAS loci have been identified and only a few genes directly implicated, addressing this issue is a particular challenge. We used a combined cellomics and proteomics approach to show that polygenic risk can be disentangled by searching for shared neuronal morphology and cellular pathway phenotypes of candidate schizophrenia risk genes.

Memory strength gates the involvement of a CREB-dependent cortical fear engram in remote memory.

Encoding and retrieval of contextual memories is initially mediated by sparsely activated neurons, so-called engram cells, in the hippocampus. Subsequent memory persistence is thought to depend on network-wide changes involving progressive contribution of cortical regions, a process referred to as systems consolidation. Using a viral-based TRAP (targeted recombination in activated populations) approach, we studied whether consolidation of contextual fear memory by neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is modulated by memory strength and CREB function.

Why try saving the ANS? An alternative proposal.

Leibovich et al. propose that continuous magnitudes and a number sense are used holistically to judge numerosity. We point out that their proposal is incomplete and implausible: incomplete, as it does not explain how continuous magnitudes are calculated; implausible, as it cannot explain performance in estimation tasks.

Dynamics of the mouse brain cortical synaptic proteome during postnatal brain development.

Development of the brain involves the formation and maturation of numerous synapses. This process requires prominent changes of the synaptic proteome and potentially involves thousands of different proteins at every synapse. To date the proteome analysis of synapse development has been studied sparsely.

Sensory-integration system rather than approximate number system underlies numerosity processing: A critical review.

It is widely accepted that human and nonhuman species possess a specialized system to process large approximate numerosities. The theory of an evolutionarily ancient approximate number system (ANS) has received converging support from developmental studies, comparative experiments, neuroimaging, and computational modelling, and it is one of the most dominant and influential theories in numerical cognition. The existence of an ANS system is significant, as it is believed to be the building block of numerical development in general.

Order information in verbal working memory shifts the subjective midpoint in both the line bisection and the landmark tasks.

A largely substantiated view in the domain of working memory is that the maintenance of serial order is achieved by generating associations of each item with an independent representation of its position, so-called position markers. Recent studies reported that the ordinal position of an item in verbal working memory interacts with spatial processing. This suggests that position markers might be spatial in nature.

Image Informatics Strategies for Deciphering Neuronal Network Connectivity.

Brain function relies on an intricate network of highly dynamic neuronal connections that rewires dramatically under the impulse of various external cues and pathological conditions. Amongst the neuronal structures that show morphological plasticity are neurites, synapses, dendritic spines and even nuclei. This structural remodelling is directly connected with functional changes such as intercellular communication and the associated calcium bursting behaviour.

Learning the association between a context and a target location in infancy.

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, ; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, ). The present study extends these results by investigating whether infants can learn the association between a target location and the context in which it is presented.

Concurrent validity of approximate number sense tasks in adults and children.

Reasoning with non-symbolic numerosities is suggested to be rooted in the Approximate Number System (ANS) and evidence pointing to a relationship between the acuity of this system and mathematics is available. In order to use the acuity of this ANS as a screening instrument to detect future math problems, it is important to model ANS acuity over development. However, whether ANS acuity and its development have been described accurately can be questioned.

The neural mechanism underlying ordinal numerosity processing.

Changes in the sensory properties of numerosity stimuli have a direct effect on the outcomes of nonsymbolic number tasks. This suggests a prominent role of sensory properties in numerosity processing. However, the current consensus holds that numerosity is processed independent of its sensory properties.

Topographic representation of high-level cognition: numerosity or sensory processing?

A recent study showed that topographic field maps of complex cognitive functions, such as numerosity, exist in the human brain. This is an exciting, novel approach for studying the neural representation of high-level cognition. However, the results can also be explained on the basis of the confounding non-numerical sensory cues of numerosity.

Visual stimulus parameters seriously compromise the measurement of approximate number system acuity and comparative effects between adults and children.

It has been suggested that a simple non-symbolic magnitude comparison task is sufficient to measure the acuity of a putative Approximate Number System (ANS). A proposed measure of the ANS, the so-called "internal Weber fraction" (w), would provide a clear measure of ANS acuity. However, ANS studies have never presented adequate evidence that visual stimulus parameters did not compromise measurements of w to such extent that w is actually driven by visual instead of numerical processes.

Task- and age-dependent effects of visual stimulus properties on children's explicit numerosity judgments.

Researchers investigating numerosity processing manipulate the visual stimulus properties (e.g., surface).

Comparing the neural distance effect derived from the non-symbolic comparison and the same-different task.

As a result of the representation of numerosities, more accurate and faster discrimination between two numerosities is observed when the distance between them increases. In previous studies, the comparison and same-different task were most frequently used to investigate this distance effect. Recently, it was questioned whether the non-symbolic distance effects derived from these tasks originate at the same level.

The neural mechanisms underlying passive and active processing of numerosity.

To investigate the difference in passive viewing and active processing of numerosity, we presented participants arrays of dots and concurrently measured their EEG. In the first condition, participants naïve to the subject under study passively viewed the dot-arrays. In the second condition, the participants were informed about the changes in numerosity and had to actively process numerosity.

Continuous visual properties explain neural responses to nonsymbolic number.

Nonsymbolic number and its continuous visual properties are confounded in everyday life: When number changes, its continuous visual properties also change. It could therefore be efficient to rely on the visual properties to judge number. The current consensus, however, holds that number is processed independent of its visual properties.

The role of visual information in numerosity estimation.

Mainstream theory suggests that the approximate number system supports our non-symbolic number abilities (e.g. estimating or comparing different sets of items).

Thinking about touch facilitates tactile but not auditory processing.

Mental imagery is considered to be important for normal conscious experience. It is most frequently investigated in the visual, auditory and motor domain (imagination of movement), while the studies on tactile imagery (imagination of touch) are scarce. The current study investigated the effect of tactile and auditory imagery on the left/right discriminations of tactile and auditory stimuli.

The interplay between nonsymbolic number and its continuous visual properties.

To date, researchers investigating nonsymbolic number processes devoted little attention to the visual properties of their stimuli. This is unexpected, as nonsymbolic number is defined by its visual characteristics. When number changes, its visual properties change accordingly.

False approximations of the approximate number system?

Prior research suggests that the acuity of the approximate number system (ANS) predicts future mathematical abilities. Modelling the development of the ANS might therefore allow monitoring of children's mathematical skills and instigate educational intervention if necessary. A major problem however, is that our knowledge of the development of the ANS is acquired using fundamentally different paradigms, namely detection in infants versus discrimination in children and adults.

Numerosities and space; indeed a cognitive illusion! A reply to de Hevia and Spelke (2009).

de Hevia and Spelke (de Hevia and Spelke (2009). Spontaneous mapping of number and space in adults and young children, Cognition, 110, 198-207) investigated the mapping of number onto space. To this end, they introduced a non-symbolic flanker task.

Generating nonsymbolic number stimuli.

Studies investigating nonsymbolic numbers (e.g., dot arrays) are confronted with the problem that changes in numerosity are always accompanied by changes in the visual properties of the stimulus.

Children's representation of symbolic and nonsymbolic magnitude examined with the priming paradigm.

How people process and represent magnitude has often been studied using number comparison tasks. From the results of these tasks, a comparison distance effect (CDE) is generated, showing that it is easier to discriminate two numbers that are numerically further apart (e.g.

Incongruence in number-luminance congruency effects.

Congruency tasks have provided support for an amodal magnitude system for magnitudes that have a "spatial" character, but conflicting results have been obtained for magnitudes that do not (e.g., luminance).