Neuroscience · Cognitive Neuroscience
Brain stimulation separated motion-discrimination accuracy from confidence in perceptual decisions. Strengthening one visual pathway affected both measures, while disrupting a parietal brain region changed confidence-related performance without altering motion discrimination.
In male mice, brief bursts of neuronal activity tracked which sensory cues predicted rewards and changed as those associations changed. Suppressing the bursts disrupted learning and task performance, providing causal evidence that they help drive associative learning.
Early blockage of NMDA receptors in male rats led to long-lasting changes in inhibitory interneurons in the visual cortex, including fewer parvalbumin-positive cells. When the rats later lived in enriched environments, parvalbumin cell counts rose and several plasticity-related protein markers increased, while NMDA receptor NR1 levels did not recover.
