By analyzing two different cue-related components, our results demonstrated that while endogenous attention was electrophysiologically dissociated from conscious perception, exogenous attention was not, Stattic ic50 consistent with the hypothesis that

exogenous attention is an important antecedent of our conscious experience. Our results support previous claims of dissociations between some forms of spatial attention and conscious perception, but also highlight the importance of exogenous orienting on the selection of information for conscious access. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Addictive drugs cause persistent restructuring of several neuronal cell types in the limbic regions of brain thought to be responsible for long-term behavioral plasticity

driving addiction. Although these structural changes are well documented in nucleus accumbens medium spiny neurons, little is known regarding the underlying molecular mechanisms. Additionally, it remains unclear whether structural plasticity and its synaptic concomitants drive addictive behaviors or whether they reflect selleck chemicals llc homeostatic compensations to the drug not related to addiction per se. Here, we discuss recent paradoxical data, which either support or oppose the hypothesis that drug-induced changes in dendritic spines drive addictive behavior. We define areas where future investigation can provide a more detailed picture of drug-induced synaptic reorganization, including ultrastructural, electrophysiological and behavioral studies.”
“The origin of altruistic behavior has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with altruistic individuals do better than those without altruists; however, the altruists within a population do worse than Etomoxir price the non-altruists and their prevalence in the population decreases due to individual selection. Under certain conditions, the strength of group selection, i.e., the selection driven by competition between populations, can surpass the strength of individual selection; however, such conditions seem to be relatively strict and

probably do not hold in many natural systems where the altruistic behavior was observed. It was suggested recently that chances for altruistic behavior to spread highly increase when it is controlled not by a single gene but by multiple independent genes substitutable in their effects on the phenotype of the individual. Here we confirm the original verbal model by numerical modeling of the spread of altruistic/selfish alleles in a metapopulation consisting of partly isolated groups of organisms (demes) interconnected by migration. We have shown that altruistic behavior coded by multiple substitutable genes can stably coexist with selfish behavior, even under relatively high mutation and migration rates, i.e., under such conditions where altruistic behavior coded by a single gene is quickly outcompeted in a metapopulation. (c) 2011 Elsevier Ltd.