Gradients of neurotransmitter receptor expression in the macaque cortex.

Dynamics and functions of neural circuits depend on interactions mediated by receptors. Therefore, a comprehensive map of receptor organization across cortical regions is needed. In this study, we used in vitro receptor autoradiography to measure the density of 14 neurotransmitter receptor types in 109 areas of macaque cortex.

Vowels and consonants matter equally to British English-learning 11-month-olds' familiar word form recognition.

While adult studies show that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing tasks, the developmental trajectory of this consonant bias varies cross-linguistically. This study tested whether British English-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of familiar word forms is more reliant on consonants than vowels, as found by Poltrock and Nazzi (2015) in French. After establishing that infants prefer listening to a list of familiar words over pseudowords (Experiment 1), Experiment 2 examined preference for consonant versus vowel mispronunciations of these words.

Consonant bias in adult lexical processing under acoustically degraded listening conditions.

Consonants facilitate lexical processing across many languages, including French. This study investigates whether acoustic degradation affects this phonological bias in an auditory lexical decision task. French words were processed using an eight-band vocoder, degrading their frequency modulations (FM) while preserving original amplitude modulations (AM).

Retrospective cueing mediates flexible conscious access to past spoken words.

Can we become aware of auditory stimuli retrospectively, even if they initially failed to reach awareness? Here, we tested whether spatial cueing of attention a word had been played could trigger retrospective conscious access. Two sound streams were presented dichotically. One stream was attended for a primary task of speeded semantic categorization.

Probing the Impact of Prematurity on Segmentation Abilities in the Context of Bilingualism.

Infants born prematurely are at a high risk of developing linguistic deficits. In the current study, we compare how full-term and healthy preterm infants without neuro-sensorial impairments segment words from fluent speech, an ability crucial for lexical acquisition. While early word segmentation abilities have been found in monolingual infants, we test here whether it is also the case for French-dominant bilingual infants with varying non-dominant languages.

The neonate brain's sensitivity to repetition-based structure: Specific to speech?

Newborns are able to extract and learn repetition-based regularities from the speech input, that is, they show greater brain activation in the bilateral temporal and left inferior frontal regions to trisyllabic pseudowords of the form AAB (e.g., "babamu") than to random ABC sequences (e.

Backward masking reveals coarse-to-fine dynamics in human V1.

Natural images exhibit luminance variations aligned across a broad spectrum of spatial frequencies (SFs). It has been proposed that, at early stages of processing, the coarse signals carried by the low SF (LSF) of the visual input are sent rapidly from primary visual cortex (V1) to ventral, dorsal and frontal regions to form a coarse representation of the input, which is later sent back to V1 to guide the processing of fine-grained high SFs (i.e.

Understanding the link between functional profiles and intelligence through dimensionality reduction and graph analysis.

There is a growing interest in neuroscience for how individual-specific structural and functional features of the cortex relate to cognitive traits. This work builds on previous research which, using classical high-dimensional approaches, has proven that the interindividual variability of functional connectivity profiles reflects differences in fluid intelligence. To provide an additional perspective into this relationship, the present study uses a recent framework for investigating cortical organization: This approach places local connectivity profiles within a common low-dimensional space whose axes are functionally interretable dimensions.

Prosodic cues enhance infants' sensitivity to nonadjacent regularities.

In language, grammatical dependencies often hold between items that are not immediately adjacent to each other. Acquiring these nonadjacent dependencies is crucial for learning grammar. However, there are potentially infinitely many dependencies in the language input.

Erratum: Reproducibility of infant fNIRS studies: a meta-analytic approach (Erratum).

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1117/1.NPh.

Layer-specific stimulations of parvalbumin-positive cortical interneurons in mice entrain brain rhythms to different frequencies.

Neocortical interneurons provide inhibition responsible for organizing neuronal activity into brain oscillations that subserve cognitive functions such as memory, attention, or prediction. However, the interneuronal contribution to the entrainment of neocortical oscillations within and across different cortical layers was not described. Here, using layer-specific optogenetic stimulations with micro-Light-Emitting Diode arrays, directed toward parvalbumin-expressing (PV) interneurons in non-anesthetized awake mice, we found that supragranular layer stimulations of PV neurons were most efficient at entraining supragranular local field potential (LFP) oscillations at gamma frequencies (γ: 25-80 Hz), whereas infragranular layer stimulation of PV neurons better entrained the LFP at delta (δ: 2-5 Hz) and theta (θ: 6-10 Hz) frequencies.

Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy to study the early developing brain: future directions and new challenges.

Significance: Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a frequently used neuroimaging tool to explore the developing brain, particularly in infancy, with studies spanning from birth to toddlerhood (0 to 2 years). We provide an overview of the challenges and opportunities that the developmental fNIRS field faces, after almost 25 years of research.

Aim: We discuss the most recent advances in fNIRS brain imaging with infants and outlines the trends and perspectives that will likely influence progress in the field in the near future.

HCN channels and absence seizures.

Hyperpolarization-activation cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels were for the first time implicated in absence seizures (ASs) when an abnormal I (the current generated by these channels) was reported in neocortical layer 5 neurons of a mouse model. Genetic studies of large cohorts of children with Childhood Absence Epilepsy (where ASs are the only clinical symptom) have identified only 3 variants in HCN1 (one of the genes that code for the 4 HCN channel isoforms, HCN1-4), with one (R590Q) mutation leading to loss-of-function. Due to the multi-faceted effects that HCN channels exert on cellular excitability and neuronal network dynamics as well as their modulation by environmental factors, it has been difficult to identify the detailed mechanism by which different HCN isoforms modulate ASs.

Natural IgG Anti-F (ab') Autoantibody Activity in Children with Autism.

Many and diverse autoimmune abnormalities have been reported in children with autism. Natural autoantibodies (NAAbs) play important immunoregulatory roles in recognition of the immune self. The objective of this study was to examine the presence of NAAbs in the sera of children with autism and across severity subgroups of autistic behavioral impairments.

The Representational Similarity between Visual Perception and Recent Perceptual History.

From moment to moment, the visual properties of objects in the world fluctuate because of external factors like ambient lighting, occlusion and eye movements, and internal (proximal) noise. Despite this variability in the incoming information, our perception is stable. Serial dependence, the behavioral attraction of current perceptual responses toward previously seen stimuli, may reveal a mechanism underlying stability: a spatiotemporally tuned operator that smooths over spurious fluctuations.

Cortical gradients during naturalistic processing are hierarchical and modality-specific.

Understanding cortical topographic organization and how it supports complex perceptual and cognitive processes is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Previous work has characterized functional gradients that demonstrate large-scale principles of cortical organization. How these gradients are modulated by rich ecological stimuli remains unknown.

Reproducibility of infant fNIRS studies: a meta-analytic approach.

Significance: Concerns about the reproducibility of experimental findings have recently emerged in many disciplines, from psychology to medicine and neuroscience. As NIRS is a relatively recent brain imaging technique, the question of reproducibility has not yet been systematically addressed.

Aim: The current study seeks to test the replicability of effects observed in NIRS experiments assessing young infants' rule-learning ability.

Music and language in the crib: Early cross-domain effects of experience on categorical perception of prominence in spoken language.

Rhythm perception helps young infants find structure in both speech and music. However, it remains unknown whether categorical perception of suprasegmental linguistic rhythm signaled by a co-variation of multiple acoustic cues can be modulated by prior between- (music) and within-domain (language) experience. Here we tested 6-month-old German-learning infants' ability to have a categorical perception of lexical stress, a linguistic prominence signaled through the co-variation of pitch, intensity, and duration.

Brain networks for temporal adaptation, anticipation, and sensory-motor integration in rhythmic human behavior.

Human interaction often requires the precise yet flexible interpersonal coordination of rhythmic behavior, as in group music making. The present fMRI study investigates the functional brain networks that may facilitate such behavior by enabling temporal adaptation (error correction), prediction, and the monitoring and integration of information about 'self' and the external environment. Participants were required to synchronize finger taps with computer-controlled auditory sequences that were presented either at a globally steady tempo with local adaptations to the participants' tap timing (Virtual Partner task) or with gradual tempo accelerations and decelerations but without adaptation (Tempo Change task).

How do human newborns come to understand the multimodal environment?

For a long time, newborns were considered as human beings devoid of perceptual abilities who had to learn with effort everything about their physical and social environment. Extensive empirical evidence gathered in the last decades has systematically invalidated this notion. Despite the relatively immature state of their sensory modalities, newborns have perceptions that are acquired, and are triggered by, their contact with the environment.

Frequency-specific brain network architecture in resting-state fMRI.

The analysis of brain function in resting-state network (RSN) models, ascertained through the functional connectivity pattern of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), is sufficiently powerful for studying large-scale functional integration of the brain. However, in RSN-based research, the network architecture has been regarded as the same through different frequency bands. Thus, here, we aimed to examined whether the network architecture changes with frequency.

Decoding Trans-Saccadic Prediction Error.

We are constantly sampling our environment by moving our eyes, but our subjective experience of the world is stable and constant. Stimulus displacement during or shortly after a saccade often goes unnoticed, a phenomenon called the saccadic suppression of displacement. Although we fail to notice such displacements, our oculomotor system computes the prediction errors and adequately adjusts the gaze and future saccadic execution, a phenomenon known as saccadic adaptation.

Tactile training facilitates infants' ability to reach to targets on the body.

This longitudinal study investigated the effect of experience with tactile stimulation on infants' ability to reach to targets on the body, an important adaptive skill. Infants were provided weekly tactile stimulation on eight body locations from 4 to 8 months of age (N = 11), comparing their ability to reach to the body to infants in a control group who did not receive stimulation (N = 10). Infants who received stimulation were more likely to successfully reach targets on the body than controls by 7 months of age.