The specific role of early visual deprivation on spatial hearing is still unclear, mainly due to the difficulty of comparing similar spatial skills at different ages and to the difficulty in recruiting young blind children from birth. In this study, the effects of early visual deprivation on the development of auditory spatial localization have been assessed in a group of seven 3-5 years old ch...

BACKGROUND Daily feeding and locomotion are interrelated behaviours. The time spent in feeding and rate of food intake depends on food availability. In low food condition, the birds would show intense movement (locomotion) for a longer time throughout the day however during abundant food supply they may chose higher activity and food intake in the morning and evening only. In the present study ...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Autophagy plays a fundamental role in cell survival under stress conditions such as nutrient deprivation. Decreased nitric oxide (NO) production, which may contribute to vascular dysfunction, is one of the consequences of autophagy in endothelial cells. The antimalarial drug chloroquine (CLQ) inhibits autophagy by blocking autophagosome formation and has been proposed as adjuvan...

Progressive loss of plasticity during development prevents refined circuits from regressing to an immature state and is thought to depend on maturation of GABAergic inhibition. For example, a gradual reduction in size of visual receptive fields (RFs) occurs in the superior colliculus (SC) during development. Maintenance of the refined state throughout adulthood requires early light exposure. He...

BACKGROUND Extended wakefulness disrupts acquisition of short-term memories in mammals. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms triggered by extended waking and restored by sleep are unknown. Moreover, the neuronal circuits that depend on sleep for optimal learning remain unidentified. RESULTS Learning was evaluated with aversive phototaxic suppression. In this task, flies learn to avoid...

Visual perceptual distortion (i.e., elongation) has been demonstrated in a single case study after several months of cortical deprivation after a stroke. Here we asked whether similar perceptual elongation can be observed in healthy participants after deprivation and, crucially, how soon after deprivation this elongation occurs. To answer this question, we patched one eye, thus noninvasively an...

Visual development depends on sensory input during an early developmental critical period. Deviation of the pointing direction of the two eyes (strabismus) or chronic optical blur (anisometropia) separately and together can disrupt the formation of normal binocular interactions and the development of spatial processing, leading to a loss of stereopsis and visual acuity known as amblyopia. To sh...

The Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy rule system is a widely used data mining technique, and is of particular use in the identification of non-linear interactions between variables. However the number of rules increases dramatically when applied to high dimensional data sets (the curse of dimensionality). Few robust methods are available to identify important rules while removing redundant ones, and th...

Fasting in vivo and nutrient deprivation in vitro enhance sequestration of mitochondria and other organelles by autophagy for recycling of essential nutrients. Here our goal was to use a transgenic mouse strain expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) fused to rat microtubule-associated protein-1 light chain 3 (LC3), a marker protein for autophagy, to characterize the dynamics of mitochondria...