Direction of visual shift and hand congruency enhance spatial realignment during visuomotor adaptation.

Although prism adaptation has been studied extensively for over 100 years to better understand how the motor system adapts to sensory perturbations, very few studies have systematically studied how the combination of the hand used to adapt, and the direction of visual shift, might influence adaptation. Given that sensory inputs and motor outputs from the same side are processed (at least initially) in the same hemisphere, we wondered whether there might be differences in how people adapt when the hand used and the direction of visual shift were congruent (e.g.

Cerebellar lesions disrupt spatial and temporal visual attention.

The current study represents the first comprehensive examination of spatial, temporal and sustained attention following cerebellar damage. Results indicated that, compared to controls, cerebellar damage resulted in a larger cueing effect at the longest SOA - possibly reflecting a slowed the onset of inhibition of return (IOR) during a reflexive covert attention task, and reduced the ability to detect successive targets during an attentional blink task. However, there was little evidence to support the notion that cerebellar damage disrupted voluntary covert attention or the sustained attention to response task (SART).

An ancient conserved role for prion protein in learning and memory.

The misfolding of cellular prion protein (PrP) to form PrP Scrapie (PrP) is an exemplar of toxic gain-of-function mechanisms inducing propagated protein misfolding and progressive devastating neurodegeneration. Despite this, PrP function in the brain is also reduced and subverted during prion disease progression; thus understanding the normal function of PrP in healthy brains is key. Disrupting PrP in mice has led to a myriad of controversial functions that sometimes map onto disease symptoms, including a proposed role in memory or learning.

Establishing zebrafish as a model to study the anxiolytic effects of scopolamine.

Scopolamine (hyoscine) is a muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist that has traditionally been used to treat motion sickness in humans. However, studies investigating depressed and bipolar populations have found that scopolamine is also effective at reducing depression and anxiety symptoms. The potential anxiety-reducing (anxiolytic) effects of scopolamine could have great clinical implications for humans; however, rats and mice administered scopolamine showed increased anxiety in standard behavioural tests.

Object recognition memory in zebrafish.

The novel object recognition, or novel-object preference (NOP) test is employed to assess recognition memory in a variety of organisms. The subject is exposed to two identical objects, then after a delay, it is placed back in the original environment containing one of the original objects and a novel object. If the subject spends more time exploring one object, this can be interpreted as memory retention.