Perceived imminence of threat and resulting intensity of defensive responses during serial compound stimulus conditioning are determined by auditory stimulus salience, not cue sequence as recently reported.
Output neurons in the mushroom body of the fruit fly brain encode the positive or negative survival value of stimuli, enabling insects to choose adaptive approach and avoidance behaviors through associative learning.
Experiments in zebrafish reveal a new role for a critical hypothalamic transcription factor, orthopedia, in controlling developmental neuropeptide balance in a discrete oxytocin-producing neuronal circuit whose disrupted development affects social behavior.
Unlike other taste modalities, the Drosophila taste system encodes salt taste combinatorially across multiple sensory neuron classes, which combine to produce behavioural valence and plasticity.
Research into light-gated ion channels called channelrhodospins laid the foundations for the development of optogenetics, a technique that has gone on to revolutionize neuroscience.
Publication bias, in which positive results are preferentially reported by authors and published by journals, can restrict the visibility of evidence against false claims and allow such claims to be canonized inappropriately as facts.
Most scientists admit to their errors but, as Eve Marder explains, the scientific community as a whole needs to rethink the way it recognizes achievement.
