The most important ability of the human vision is object recognition, yet it is exactly the less understood aspect of the vision system. Computational models have been helpful in progressing towards an explanation of this obscure cognitive ability, and today it is possible to conceive more refined models, thanks to the new availability of neuroscientific data about the human visual cortex. This...

The influence of music on the human brain has been recently investigated in numerous studies. Several investigations have shown that structural and functional cerebral neuroplastic processes emerge as a result of long-term musical training, which in turn may produce cognitive differences between musicians and non-musicians. Musicians can be considered ideal cases for studies on brain adaptation...

In the brain, astrocytes dynamically interact with neuronal synapses via fine processes. New data show that, in response to synaptic plasticity stimuli, astrocyte processes rapidly move towards and enwrap active synapses, aiding in the stabilization and maintenance of active connections.

Recent cellular and molecular studies of memory storage suggest that experience dependent modulation of synaptic strength and structure is a fundamental mechanism bywhich the diverse forms of memory are encoded and stored. For memory storage, sometype of synaptic growth is thought to represent the stable cellular change that maintainsthe long-term process. In its most general form, the synaptic...

The acquisition of new memories for places and events requires synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, and plasticity depends on temporal coordination among neurons. Spatial activity in the hippocampus is relatively disorganized during the initial exploration of a novel environment, however, and it is unclear how neural activity during the initial stages of learning drives synaptic plasticity. ...

[This corrects the article on p. 351 in vol. 9, PMID: 26483626.].

The 20th annual Barrels meeting brought together researchers who utilize behavioral, physiological, anatomical, and molecular techniques to understand the structure and function of the barrel system. Barrels XX featured talks on the role inhibition has in shaping cortical responses within the barrel system, the molecular cues that influence the development of the whisker-to-barrel system, and t...

Synaptic plasticity is the capacity of a preexisting connection between two neurons to change in strength as a function of neural activity. Because synaptic plasticity is the major candidate mechanism for learning and memory, the elucidation of its constituting mechanisms is of crucial importance in many aspects of normal and pathological brain function. In particular, a prominent aspect that r...

Recent models of the oculomotor delayed response task have been based on the assumption that working memory is stored as a persistent activity state (a 'bump' state). The delay activity is maintained by a finely tuned synaptic weight matrix producing a line attractor. Here we present an alternative hypothesis, that fast Hebbian synaptic plasticity is the mechanism underlying working memory. A c...