Nucleus accumbens dopamine release reflects the selective nature of pair bonds.

In monogamous species, prosocial behaviors directed toward partners are dramatically different from those directed toward unknown individuals and potential threats. Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens has a well-established role in social reward and motivation, but how this mechanism may be engaged to drive the highly divergent social behaviors directed at a partner or unfamiliar conspecific remains unknown. Using monogamous prairie voles, we first employed receptor pharmacology in partner preference and social operant tasks to show that dopamine is critical for the appetitive drive for social interaction but not for low-effort, unconditioned consummatory behaviors.

Neural signatures of auditory hypersensitivity following acoustic trauma.

Neurons in sensory cortex exhibit a remarkable capacity to maintain stable firing rates despite large fluctuations in afferent activity levels. However, sudden peripheral deafferentation in adulthood can trigger an excessive, non-homeostatic cortical compensatory response that may underlie perceptual disorders including sensory hypersensitivity, phantom limb pain, and tinnitus. Here, we show that mice with noise-induced damage of the high-frequency cochlear base were behaviorally hypersensitive to spared mid-frequency tones and to direct optogenetic stimulation of auditory thalamocortical neurons.

Visual Memories Bypass Normalization.

How distinct are visual memory representations from visual perception? Although evidence suggests that briefly remembered stimuli are represented within early visual cortices, the degree to which these memory traces resemble true visual representations remains something of a mystery. Here, we tested whether both visual memory and perception succumb to a seemingly ubiquitous neural computation: normalization. Observers were asked to remember the contrast of visual stimuli, which were pitted against each other to promote normalization either in perception or in visual memory.