Listening to one sound source among many (‘the cocktail party problem’) is particularly difficult when competing sources are similar and change over time. Such sources may not have consistent features (e.g., high vs. low ...

The ease and grace of animal movements belie the incredible challenge of controlling those movements, as the motor system does so capably. To maintain this fine control, the motor system needs to adapt to changes in the ...

Recent studies have highlighted growing evidence that the hippocampus assumes an underappreciated role in promoting social memories. However, the mechanisms by which discrimination of social and non-social stimuli are ...

Circadian rhythms, endogenous, entrainable, near-24 h oscillations in metabolism, are a nearly ubiquitous feature of life on Earth. Circadian rhythms function as a feedforward biological control system that reorganizes ...

Visually-guided navigation engages a network of cortical areas to process sensory information and plan movements, including visual, parietal, and retrosplenial regions. These regions have been mapped based on anatomy and ...

Embryos pattern themselves with remarkable consistency and readily adjust their patterning programs to drastic changes in embryo size. This robustness of pattern formation, termed scale invariance, requires cells to determine ...

In disease biology, animal models are widely used. By offering insights on disease etiology, they allow us to systematically examine the complexity of a disease and its mechanisms. However, over the last decade, failures ...

Midbrain dopamine neurons signal reward prediction error (RPE), or actual minus expected reward. The temporal difference (TD) learning model has been a cornerstone in understanding how dopamine RPEs could drive associative ...

Most behaviors are not just actions and reactions, but are the result of self-evaluation and are the means of self-fulfillment. This means that the same external context (e.g. food) can hold different meaning to an animal ...

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) provides a constant homeostatic brain environment that is essential for proper neural function. A single layer of continuous endothelial cells lining the walls of central nervous system (CNS) ...