Amygdala lesions impaired the acquisition of CRs, which did not reach the level of sham-operated mice, even after prolonged training sessions. MSC injections into the lateral amygdala severely impaired CRs, which began to recover after the removal of MSC. RN inactivation with MSC completely abolished CRs, and removal of MSC immediately restored CRs to the level of control mice. The results indicate that: (i) the DCN are important,

Selleckchem AZD6244 but not essential, at least for the late acquisition in mouse eyeblink conditioning; (ii) the amygdala plays an important role in the acquisition and expression of CRs; and (iii) the RN is essential for the expression of CRs. Our findings reveal the various brain areas critically involved in mouse eyeblink conditioning, which include the cerebellum, amygdala and RN. “
“Forward locomotion has been extensively studied in different vertebrate animals, and the principal role of spinal mechanisms in the generation of this form of locomotion has been demonstrated. Vertebrate animals, however, are capable of other forms of locomotion, such as backward walking and swimming, sideward walking, and crawling. Do the spinal mechanisms play a principal role in the generation of these forms of locomotion? We addressed this question in lampreys, which are capable of five different forms of locomotion – fast Selleck PTC124 forward swimming, slow forward swimming, backward

swimming, forward crawling, and backward crawling. To induce locomotion in lampreys spinalised at the second gill level, we used either electrical stimulation of the spinal cord at different rostrocaudal levels, or tactile stimulation of specific cutaneous receptive fields from which a given form of locomotion could be evoked in intact lampreys. We found that any of the five forms of locomotion could be evoked in the spinal

lamprey by electrical stimulation of the spinal cord, and some of them by tactile stimulation. These results suggest that spinal mechanisms in the lamprey, in the absence of phasic supraspinal commands, check details are capable of generating the basic pattern for all five forms of locomotion observed in intact lampreys. In spinal lampreys, the direction of swimming did not depend on the site of spinal cord stimulation, but on the stimulation strength. The direction of crawling strongly depended on the body configuration. The spinal structures presumably activated by spinal cord stimulation and causing different forms of locomotion are discussed. “
“Spatial attention mediates the selection of information from different parts of space. When a brief cue is presented shortly before a target [cue to target onset asynchrony (CTOA)] in the same location, behavioral responses are facilitated, a process called attention capture. At longer CTOAs, responses to targets presented in the same location are inhibited; this is called inhibition of return (IOR).