A K-8 charter school has opened in Livingston, Ala., that is making history.

Concerns about local school systems can pose recruitment and retention hurdles for the armed services as they seek to meet the needs of military families.

A bill approved in both houses of the California legislature would allow certified teachers six paid weeks of maternity leave.

California just made school accountability much more complicated. And that's good.

The bill would have given public school teachers at least six weeks of paid maternity leave.

Utah is one of four states where state laws conflict with components of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act meaning districts may have to answer to two separate accountability systems this fall.

Recent Census data finds households in the South and Midwest lagging those in other regions in access to remote learning technologies and learning interactions with teachers and family members.

The Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, or ConnCAN, has profiled five successful early childhood education programs in other states for ideas to help programs in Connecticut.

The state, which earned a B, is one of the nation’s wealthiest and turned in strong performances in the school finance arena and in areas such as preschool and kindergarten enrollment.

In this seventh installment on the growth in dual-language learning, two experts from Delaware explore how state education leaders can build capacity to support both students and educators.

The scene at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the surrounding area after the shootings shifted from chaos and panic to grief, anger, and calls for swift and aggressive action to prevent other school attacks.

Florida's teachers are marching on Tallahassee today. Hard-working teachers deserve a big raise and talented teachers are profoundly underpaid. But teachers ought not overplay their hand, or they're likely to face a backlash of their own.

A Tallahassee, Fla., K-8 school is mourning two staff members and a former employee. All of them recently died from the virus.

Controversy over an intiative aimed a reducing inequities in Lee's Summit, Mo., schools led the police department to provide security protection for the district's first African-American superintendent. Now the school board has reversed course.

When Scott Gann learned his son Dustin had dyslexia, he was shocked at the school's reaction. No one there wanted to use the word.

Primary season is now upon us. Here are three ideas for teaching in the wake of the Iowa caucus fallout.

Alexandria Area High School was created to accommodate changes in education and technology.

Resurrecting an old idea about assessing school quality could allow schools to examine a broad range of data on performance and practices and lead to improvement.

Recent Census data finds households in the South and Midwest lagging those in other regions in access to remote learning technologies and learning interactions with teachers and family members.

Could the Islanders potentially find themselves in a wild-card spot on Wednesday morning? In this economy?

Elvis Merzlikins is expected to start for the Blue Jackets, who are mired in a five-game losing streak and have never beaten the Kraken in regulation.

When can we expect the Islanders to get healthy?

It's possible there could be an eight-way tie atop the SEC standings at the end of the regular season. Then what will the College Football Playoff committee do?

The CFP's annual love affair with the SEC appears finished. The latest rankings dropped a hammer on the mighty league where "it just means more."

The state, which earned a D-plus, scored low on the Chance for Success Index, which tracks a host of socioeconomic factors that can affect the educational environment.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up the question of whether courts must find a juvenile offender permanently incorrigible before a sentence of life without parole.

Nov. 12—THE ASSOCIATED PRESS TOP 25 The top 25 teams in The Associated Press' women's college basketball poll, with first-place votes in parentheses, and total points based on 25 points for a first-place vote through one point for a 25th-place vote and previous ranking. Rk., Team ReC. Pts Prv 1. South Carolina (31) 2-0 775 1 2. Connecticut 2-0 733 2 3. Southern Cal 2-0 703 3 4. Texas 1-0 665 4 ...

Steven F. Grieco
Nov 9, 2022; 42:8439-8449
Symposium and Mini-Symposium

Rafael G. Almeida
Oct 18, 2017; 37:10023-10034
Viewpoints

Guo-qiang Bi
Dec 15, 1998; 18:10464-10472
Articles

Robbert Havekes
Dec 12, 2012; 32:18137-18149
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Michele Deodato
Oct 2, 2024; 44:e2308232024-e2308232024
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Prithviraj Rajebhosale
Oct 23, 2024; 44:e0063242024-e0063242024
Cellular

Evdokia Menelaou
Aug 8, 2012; 32:10925-10939
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Hannah Grotzinger
May 29, 2024; 44:e1856232024-e1856232024
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Randy L. Buckner
Aug 24, 2005; 25:7709-7717
Neurobiology of Disease

Umut Güçlü
Jul 8, 2015; 35:10005-10014
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

As evidence mounts that the cardiac-sympathetic nervous system reacts to challenging cognitive settings, we ask if these responses are epiphenomenal companions or if there is evidence suggesting a more intertwined role of this system with cognitive function. Healthy male and female human participants performed an approach-avoidance paradigm, trading off monetary reward for painful electric shock, while we recorded simultaneous electroencephalographic and cardiac-sympathetic signals. Participants were reward sensitive but also experienced approach-avoidance "conflict" when the subjective appeal of the reward was near equivalent to the revulsion of the cost. Drift-diffusion model parameters suggested that participants managed conflict in part by integrating larger volumes of evidence into choices (wider decision boundaries). Late alpha-band (neural) dynamics were consistent with widening decision boundaries serving to combat reward sensitivity and spread attention more fairly to all dimensions of available information. Independently, wider boundaries were also associated with cardiac "contractility" (an index of sympathetically mediated positive inotropy). We also saw evidence of conflict-specific "collaboration" between the neural and cardiac-sympathetic signals. In states of high conflict, the alignment (i.e., product) of alpha dynamics and contractility were associated with a further widening of the boundary, independent of either signal's singular association. Cross-trial coherence analyses provided additional evidence that the autonomic systems controlling cardiac-sympathetics might influence the assessment of information streams during conflict by disrupting or overriding reward processing. We conclude that cardiac-sympathetic control might play a critical role, in collaboration with cognitive processes, during the approach-avoidance conflict in humans.

Recent visual experience heavily influences our visual perception, but how neuronal activity is reshaped to alter and improve perceptual discrimination remains unknown. We recorded from populations of neurons in visual cortical area V4 while two male rhesus macaque monkeys performed a natural image change detection task under different experience conditions. We found that maximizing the recent experience with a particular image led to an improvement in the ability to detect a change in that image. This improvement was associated with decreased neural responses to the image, consistent with neuronal changes previously seen in studies of adaptation and expectation. We found that the magnitude of behavioral improvement was correlated with the magnitude of response suppression. Furthermore, this suppression of activity led to an increase in signal separation, providing evidence that a reduction in activity can improve stimulus encoding. Within populations of neurons, greater recent experience was associated with decreased trial-to-trial shared variability, indicating that a reduction in variability is a key means by which experience influences perception. Taken together, the results of our study contribute to an understanding of how recent visual experience can shape our perception and behavior through modulating activity patterns in the mid-level visual cortex.

Neuronal cytotoxic edema is implicated in neuronal injury and death, yet mitigating brain edema with osmotic and surgical interventions yields poor clinical outcomes. Importantly, neuronal swelling and its downstream consequences during early brain development remain poorly investigated, and new treatment approaches are needed. We explored Ca²⁺-dependent downstream effects after neuronal cytotoxic edema caused by diverse injuries in mice of both sexes using multiphoton Ca²⁺ imaging in vivo [Postnatal Day (P)12–17] and in acute brain slices (P8–12). After different excitotoxic insults, cytosolic GCaMP6s translocated into the nucleus after a few minutes in a subpopulation of neurons, persisting for hours. We used an automated morphology-detection algorithm to detect neuronal soma and quantified the nuclear translocation of GCaMP6s as the nuclear to cytosolic intensity (N/C ratio). Elevated neuronal N/C ratios occurred concurrently with persistent elevation in Ca²⁺ loads and could also occur independently from neuronal swelling. Electron microscopy revealed that the nuclear translocation was associated with the increased nuclear pore size. The nuclear accumulation of GCaMP6s in neurons led to neocortical circuit dysfunction, mitochondrial pathology, and increased cell death. Inhibiting calpains, a family of Ca²⁺-activated proteases, prevented elevated N/C ratios and neuronal swelling. In summary, in the developing brain, we identified a calpain-dependent alteration of nuclear transport in a subpopulation of neurons after disease-relevant insults leading to long-term circuit dysfunction and cell death. The nuclear translocation of GCaMP6 and other cytosolic proteins after acute excitotoxicity can be an early biomarker of brain injury in the developing brain.

Abnormal neuronal morphological features, such as dendrite branching, axonal branching, and spine density, are thought to contribute to the symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, the role and molecular mechanisms of aberrant neuronal morphology in the regulation of mood disorders remain poorly characterized. Here, we show that neuritin, an activity-dependent protein, regulates the axonal morphology of serotonin neurons. Male neuritin knock-out (KO) mice harbored impaired axonal branches of serotonin neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex and basolateral region of the amygdala (BLA), and male neuritin KO mice exhibited depressive and anxiety-like behaviors. We also observed that the expression of neuritin was decreased by unpredictable chronic stress in the male mouse brain and that decreased expression of neuritin was associated with reduced axonal branching of serotonin neurons in the brain and with depressive and anxiety behaviors in mice. Furthermore, the stress-mediated impairments in axonal branching and depressive behaviors were reversed by the overexpression of neuritin in the BLA. The ability of neuritin to increase axonal branching in serotonin neurons involves fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signaling, and neuritin contributes to FGF-2-mediated axonal branching regulation in vitro. Finally, the oral administration of an FGF inhibitor reduced the axonal branching of serotonin neurons in the brain and caused depressive and anxiety behaviors in male mice. Our results support the involvement of neuritin in models of stress-induced depression and suggest that neuronal morphological plasticity may play a role in controlling animal behavior.

Neural decoding is a tool for understanding how activities from a population of neurons inside the brain relate to the outside world and for engineering applications such as brain–machine interfaces. However, neural decoding studies mainly focused on different decoding algorithms rather than different neuron types which could use different coding strategies. In this study, we used two-photon calcium imaging to assess three auditory spatial decoders (space map, opponent channel, and population pattern) in excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the dorsal inferior colliculus of male and female mice. Our findings revealed a clustering of excitatory neurons that prefer similar interaural level difference (ILD), the primary spatial cues in mice, while inhibitory neurons showed random local ILD organization. We found that inhibitory neurons displayed lower decoding variability under the opponent channel decoder, while excitatory neurons achieved higher decoding accuracy under the space map and population pattern decoders. Further analysis revealed that the inhibitory neurons’ preference for ILD off the midline and the excitatory neurons’ heterogeneous ILD tuning account for their decoding differences. Additionally, we discovered a sharper ILD tuning in the inhibitory neurons. Our computational model, linking this to increased presynaptic inhibitory inputs, was corroborated using monaural and binaural stimuli. Overall, this study provides experimental and computational insight into how excitatory and inhibitory neurons uniquely contribute to the coding of sound locations.

Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have associated intronic variants in PDE4B, encoding cAMP-specific phosphodiesterase-4B (PDE4B), with increased risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as schizophrenia and substance use disorders that are often comorbid with it. However, the pathophysiological mechanisms of genetic risk involving PDE4B are poorly understood. To examine the effects of PDE4B variation on phenotypes with translational relevance to psychiatric disorders, we focused on PDE4B missense variant M220T, which is present in the human genome as rare coding variant rs775201287. When expressed in HEK-293 cells, PDE4B1-M220T exhibited an attenuated response to a forskolin-elicited increase in the intracellular cAMP concentration. In behavioral tests, homozygous Pde4b^M220T male mice with a C57BL/6JJcl background exhibited increased reactivity to novel environments, startle hyperreactivity, prepulse inhibition deficits, altered cued fear conditioning, and enhanced spatial memory, accompanied by an increase in cAMP signaling pathway-regulated expression of BDNF in the hippocampus. In response to a traumatic event (10 tone–shock pairings), neuronal activity was decreased in the cortex but enhanced in the amygdala and hippocampus of Pde4b^M220T mice. At 24 h post-trauma, Pde4b^M220T mice exhibited increased startle hyperreactivity and decreased plasma corticosterone levels, similar to phenotypes exhibited by PTSD patients. Trauma-exposed Pde4b^M220T mice also exhibited a slower decay in freezing at 15 and 30 d post-trauma, demonstrating enhanced persistence of traumatic memories, similar to that exhibited by PTSD patients. These findings provide substantive mouse model evidence linking PDE4B variation to PTSD-relevant phenotypes and thus highlight how genetic variation of PDE4B may contribute to PTSD risk.