Why Haven’t They Done That Yet? This is a strange post because I am talking about someone having done the work I will write about, but I am asking someone to do the work. This is my way of trying to drum up replications and increased n’s. I think as scientists we need to replicate … More A new way to study memory in Down Syndrome
Ooh Ooh Ooh! They Finally Did It! So this has been a GREAT week in research. A new protocol was reported for building an open-hardware/open-software operant chamber for testing rats called the ArduiPod Box. Now I have been planning and scheming on how to do this for ages, but never got around to it. I … More Open Hardware/Software Leads to a Better Behavioral Tasks
Over the last few years there has been increasing interest in behavioral pattern separation. This has primarily focused on spatial pattern separation in rats and mice or pattern separation of visual objects as evaluated in humans. What has been overlooked is a vast literature of temporal pattern separation extending into the early 1990s. The manuscript I will cover in this post not only addresses this type of temporal pattern separation, but also used spatial and temporal pattern separation abilities as outcome measures for a mutant mouse to demonstrate the neurophysiological deficits that are different in different parts of the hippocampus map onto functional deficits at the behavioral level.
… More Spatial and Temporal Pattern Separation Tasks Tease Apart Hippocampus NMDAR Function
So in this post I want to talk about a theoretical review paper I published not long ago. This paper is important to me for a couple of reasons: 1) It serves as a logical extension to my theoretical work wherein I first claimed to demonstrate a behavioral endophenotype in CGG KI mice. I suggested in this paper that I would be able to predict where the *Fmr1* KO would compare based on the molecular genetics. And 2) The data I used in this review came from a series of studies from another laboratory using behavioral tasks I developed .
… More Neurocognitive Endophenotypes in CGG KI and Fmr1 KO Mouse Models
In this post I want to discuss an example of when behavioral testing on a mouse model of human disease is done entirely correct. In this case, the right task was chosen for mice, and was developed in very close collaboration with the clinician whose work in humans was being modeled by the mice. This approach, called endophenotyping, actually studies non-core features of autism in a mouse model, but rather models cognitive processing in human autism using a mouse model. … More Great Behavioral Tasks can Validate Mouse Models of Autism
Why Haven't They Done That Yet? 