Behavioral Neuroscience

This is the first book to deal with both the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms in appetites for drugs, food, sex, and gambling, and considers whether there are common factors between them. The book approaches this by looking at the bases of both normal and abnormal appetites in humans.

What is attention? How does it go wrong? Do attention deficits arise from genes or from the environment? Can we cure it with drugs or training? Are there disorders of attention other than deficit disorders? The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research on the subject of attention. This research has been facilitated by advances on several fronts: New methods are now available for viewing brain activity in real time, there is expanding information on the complexities of the biochemistry of neural activity, individual genes can be isolated and their functions identified, analysis of the component processes included under the broad umbrella of “attention” has become increasingly sophisticated, and ingenious methods have been devised for measuring typical and atypical development of these processes, from infancy into childhood, and then into adulthood. This book is concerned with attention and its development, both typical and atypical, particularly in disorders with a known genetic etiology or assumed genetic linkage. Tremendous advances across seemingly diverse disciplines — molecular genetics, pediatric neurology, child psychiatry, developmental cognitive neuroscience, and education s— have culminated in a wealth of new methods for elucidating disorders at multiple levels, possibly paving the way for new treatment options. The book uses three specific-yet-interlinking levels of analysis: genetic blueprint (genotype), the developing brain, and the behavioral-cognitive outcomes (phenotype), as the basis for charting the attention profiles of six well-documented neurodevelopmental disorders: ADHD, autism, fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, and 22_q11 deletion syndrome.

This book contains a wide range of information of huge complexity on rat behavior. The book has three objectives. The first objective is to present an introduction of rat behavior. In choosing the rat as the subject species, the book has made the assumption that this species will remain, as it has in the past, the primary subject used the laboratory investigations of behavior. The second objective is to describe the organization and complexity of rat behavior. The major theme emerging from many lines of research on rat behavior is that understanding the rules of behavioral organization will be central in understanding the structural basis of behavior. The third objective is to update, as much as is possible, previous compendiums of rat behavior. Behavioral neuroscience continues to be a diverse field of research in which there remain many competing experimental methods and hypotheses. The behavioral descriptions in this book are closely tied to the laboratory methods from which they were derived, thus allowing investigators to exploit both the behavior and the methods for their own research. The first part of the book includes sections on natural history, sensory systems, motor systems, regulatory systems, development and parental behavior, social behavior, cognitive functions, and models. The second section is comprised by the major tests used by scientists interested in each domain of behavior.

There are many modes of communication that neurons use to transmit information besides what has come to be called neurotransmission. Many of these other types of communication can be classified as neuromodulatory, where instead of conveying excitation or inhibition, the signal from one neuron changes the properties of other neurons or synapses. This form of neuronal communication is often overlooked by systems physiologists, but it is extremely prevalent in the nervous system and needs to be included in any description of how the nervous system processes information. This book provides the foundations for understanding the cellular and molecular basis for neuromodulatory effects. It illustrates some key examples of the roles played by neuromodulation in sensory processing, neuromuscular transmission, generation of motor behaviours, and learning. Finally, the book seeks to point out areas that are likely to be of importance in the future study of information processing by the nervous system. It also summarizes a vast amount of research, and puts it into the context of how these cellular mechanisms are used in systems of neurons. By spanning the levels of analysis from sub-cellular mechanisms through cellular properties and neuronal systems to behaviour, the book provides a framework for understanding this currently exploding field of research.

The primary goal of this book is to summarize and synthesize recent advances in the biological study of aggression. Other than maternal aggression, most aggressive encounters among human and non-human animals represent a male proclivity; thus, most of the research in this book describes and discusses studies using the most appropriate murine model: testosterone-dependent offensive inter-male aggression, which is typically measured in resident-intruder or isolation-induced aggression tests. The research emphasizes various molecules that have been linked to aggression tests. It also emphasizes various molecules that have been linked to aggression by the latest gene-targeting and pharmacological techniques. Although the evidence continues to point to androgens and serotonin (5-HT) as major hormonal and neurotransmitter factors in aggressive behavior, recent work with GABA, dopamine, vasopressin, and other factors, such as nitric oxide, has revealed significant interactions with the neural circuitry underlying aggression.

This revised edition offers an integrated approach to brain sciences, covering the whole range of normal and abnormal brain function and the effects of drugs on the human brain. It provides a general view of how the brain functions in health and disease, and how drugs may cause disorders.

We know as architects that the ability to measure human response to environmental stimuli still requires more years of work. Neuroscience is beginning to provide us with an understanding of how the brain controls all of our bodily activities, and ultimately affects how we think, move, perceive, learn, and remember. In an address to the American Institute of Architects convention in 2003, “Rusty” Gage made the following observations that set the core premise for this book: (1) The brain controls our behavior; (2) Genes control the blueprints for the design and structure of the brain; (3) The environment can modulate the function of genes, and ultimately, the structure of the brain; (4) Changes in the environment change the brain; (5) Consequently, changes in the environment change our behavior; and (6) Therefore, architectural design can change our brain and our behavior.

Broca's region has been in the news ever since scientists realized that particular cognitive functions could be localized to parts of the cerebral cortex. Its discoverer, Paul Broca, was one of the first researchers to argue for a direct connection between a concrete behavior—in this case, the use of language—and a specific cortical region. Today, Broca's region is perhaps the most famous part of the human brain, and for over a century, has persisted as the focus of intense research and numerous debates. The name has even penetrated mainstream culture through popular science and the theater. Broca's region is famous for a good reason: As language is one of the most distinctive human traits, the cognitive mechanisms that support it and the tissues in which these mechanisms are housed are also quite complex, and so have the potential to reveal a lot not only about how words, phrases, sentences, and grammatical rules are instantiated in neural tissue, but also, and more broadly, about how brain function relates to behavior. Paul Broca's discoveries were an important, driving force behind the more general effort to relate complex behavior to particular parts of the cerebral cortex, which, significantly, produced the first brain maps.

The hippocampus is one of the most studied structures in the human brain and plays a pivotal role in human memory function. It's recognized function is reflected by the presence of an extensive body of neurophysiological, neuropsychological, anatomical, and neurocomputational literature that presents basic mechanisms, theoretical models, and psychological concepts. However, in the rapidly growing field of hippocampal research, the clinical aspects of diseases that affect the hippocampus are greatly under-represented, and clinical approaches and concepts are scattered throughout various clinical and basic scientific disciplines. This book explores clinical approaches to the range of diseases that affect the hippocampus. It brings together and reviews the common methods, clinical findings, concepts, mechanisms and, where applicable, therapeutic strategies for these clinical approaches. The clinical spectrum of hippocampal dysfunction encompasses a wide range of neurological, behavioural, and psychiatric symptoms and surpasses the ability to encode, store, and retrieve information. The relevance of hippocampal involvement in clinical diseases goes beyond mere neuropsychological deficits and includes psychopathological states in various conditions, such as acute amnesic syndromes, Alzheimer's disease, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), sleep, stroke medicine, limbic encephalitis, neurodevelopmental disorders, stress- and trauma-related disorders, depression, and schizophrenia.

Until very recently, our knowledge about the neural basis of cognitive aging was based on two disciplines that had very little contact with each other. Whereas the neuroscience of aging investigated the effects of aging on the brain independently of age-related changes in cognition, the cognitive psychology of aging investigated the effects of aging on cognition independently of age-related changes in the brain. The lack of communication between these two disciplines is currently being addressed by an increasing number of studies that focus on the relationships between cognitive aging and cerebral aging. This rapidly growing body of research has come to constitute a new discipline, which may be called cognitive neuroscience of aging. The goal of this book is to introduce this new discipline. This book is divided into four main sections. The first section describes non-invasive measures of cerebral aging, including structural (e.g., volumetric MRI), chemical (e.g., dopamine PET), electrophysiological (e.g., ERPs), and hemodynamic (e.g., fMRI), and discusses how they can be linked to behavioral measures of cognitive aging. The second section reviews evidence for the effects of aging on neural activity during different cognitive functions, including perception and attention, imagery, working memory, long-term memory, and prospective memory. The third section focuses on clinical and applied topics, such as the distinction between healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease and the use of cognitive training to ameliorate age-related cognitive decline. The last section describes theories that relate cognitive and cerebral aging, including models accounting for functional neuroimaging evidence and models supported by computer simulations.