Informal

musical activities appear to enhance these auditory processes in early childhood and therefore might very well also influence the later development of auditory skills relevant not only for music perception but also speech processing. Our results highlight that not only formal musical training but also implicit musical learning may have important effects on auditory development. Future studies should look for factors that might mediate the relations between the musical activities and auditory skills revealed in the current study and map the long-term stability of these associations. This work was supported by the National Doctoral Programme of Psychology. The

authors have no conflict of interest to declare. Abbreviations see more ERP event-related potential LDN late discriminative negativity MMN mismatch selleck kinase inhibitor negativity RON reorienting negativity “
“Various lines of evidence suggest a mechanistic role for altered cAMP-CREB (cAMP response element – binding protein) signaling in depressive and affective disorders. However, the establishment and validation of human inter-individual differences in this and other major signaling pathways has proven difficult. Here, we describe a novel lentiviral methodology to investigate signaling variation over long periods of time directly in human primary fibroblasts. On a cellular level, this method showed surprisingly large inter-individual differences in three major signaling pathways in human subjects that nevertheless correlated with cellular measures of genome-wide transcription and drug toxicity. We next validated this method by establishing a likely role for cAMP-mediated signaling in a human neuroendocrine response to light – the light-dependent suppression of the circadian hormone melatonin – that shows wide inter-individual differences of unknown origin

in vivo. Finally, we show an overall greater magnitude of cellular CREB signaling in individuals with bipolar disorder, suggesting a possible role for this signaling pathway in susceptibility to mental disease. Overall, our results suggest that genetic science differences in major signaling pathways can be reliably detected with sensitive viral-based reporter profiling, and that these differences can be conserved across tissues and be predictive of physiology and disease susceptibility. “
“Surround inhibition (SI) is a neural process that has been extensively investigated in the sensory system and has been recently probed in the motor system. Muscle-specific modulation of corticospinal excitability at the onset of an isolated finger movement has been assumed to reflect the presence of SI in the motor system.