An influential theory in this field is “scanpath theory” (Norton & Stark, 1971), which proposed that reinstatement of the sequence of eye-movements made during encoding of a visual stimulus plays a causal role in its subsequent successful recognition. A hard interpretation of this theory entails that recapitulation of eye-movements made during encoding of visual scenes facilitates successful recall. However, a recent study BMS-754807 supplier by Martarelli and Mast (2013) manipulated eye-position during pictorial recall and found that there was no increase in memory accuracy when participants looked at areas where stimuli had previously appeared, in comparison to when

they looked at non-corresponding areas of screen. Similarly, Foulsham and Kingstone (2013) have recently reported a series of experiments in which participants’ fixations were constrained during AZD6244 concentration encoding and recognition of images in order to manipulate scanpath similarity. Although scanpath similarity was a predictor of recognition accuracy, there was no recognition advantage when participants re-viewed their own fixations of a

scene versus someone else’s, or for retaining serial order of fixations between encoding and recognition. Foulsham and Kingston conclude that while congruency in eye-movements between encoding and retrieval is beneficial for scene recognition, there is no evidence to suggest recapitulation of the exact scanpath at encoding is necessary for accurate recall. Our own results are broadly in line with these recent findings, as there is no evidence from Experiment 3 in the present study that the ability to engage in saccade preparation to memorized locations

is necessary for their accurate recall. Thus, while the rehearsal of directly salient locations in the oculomotor system allows for optimal spatial memory at recall, we regard this as a contributing mnemonic mechanism that operates in conjunction with visually-based strategies such as mental path construction or visual imagery (Parmentier et al., 2005 and Rudkin et al., 2007). Critically, we have previously shown Bay 11-7085 that eye-abduction only reduces, rather than abolishes, spatial memory even when applied across all encoding, maintenance, and retrieval stages of a trial (Ball et al., 2013). Therefore, clearly the involvement of oculomotor encoding and rehearsal enhances spatial memory for a sequence of visually-salient locations rather than critically enables it. However, this position is not dissimilar to that observed when articulatory suppression is used to prevent subvocal rehearsal of words and digits during verbal working memory ( Baddeley et al., 1975 and Murray, 1967), where verbal memory span is significantly reduced but not abolished ( Baddeley, 2003). Both the findings of Ball et al.

We thank Associate Editor Veerle Vanacker and two anonymous reviewers for providing thoughtful comments and suggestions that helped us to improve the paper. “
“Large rivers deliver substantial amounts of terrestrial sediment, freshwater,

and nutrient to the sea, serving as the major Dorsomorphin ic50 linkage between the continent and the ocean. Inputs of freshwater and terrestrial sediments have multiple morphological, physical and bio-geochemical implications for the coastal environment (Chu et al., 2006, Raymond et al., 2008, Blum and Roberts, 2009, Wang et al., 2010 and Cui and Li, 2011). Riverine material in a large system is a complex function of hydrologic variables influenced by a combination of natural and anthropogenic processes over the watershed (Milliman and Syvitski, 1992), and is thus considered a valuable indicator of global change. The past several decades have witnessed varying levels of changes in water and sediment discharges for large rivers, e.g. the Yangtze in China, the Nile in Egypt, the Chao Phraya river in Thailand,

the Red River in Vietnam, the Mississippi River and the Columbia River in the United States, in addition to the Huanghe (Yellow River) in China (Yang et al., 1998, Peterson et al., 2002, Yang et al., 2006, Wang et al., 2006, Wang et al., 2007, Meade and Moody, 2010 and Naik and Jay, 2011). The BGB324 mouse five largest rivers in East and Southeast Asia (Huanghe, Changjiang (Yangtze River), Peal, Red and Mekong) now annually deliver only 600 × 109 kg of sediment to the ocean, representing a 60% Fenbendazole decrease from levels in the year 1000 BP (Wang et al., 2011), whereas in the Arctic Ocean, an increase of freshwater delivered by rivers has been observed (Peterson et al., 2002 and Giles et al., 2012). Many studies have attempted to link these changes

to climatic and anthropogenic drivers (Vörösmarty et al., 2000, Syvitski et al., 2005, Wang et al., 2006, Wang et al., 2007, Walling, 2006, Milliman et al., 2008, Rossi et al., 2009, Dang et al., 2010 and Meade and Moody, 2010), with possibilities as diverse as changes in basin precipitation, North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), EI Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), land cover changes, large reservoir impoundment, and water consumption (Peterson et al., 2002, Wang et al., 2006, Wang et al., 2007 and Milliman et al., 2008). Anthropogenic processes play a significant role in changing the movement of riverine material to the sea (Vörösmarty et al., 2003 and Syvitski et al., 2005). This is particularly true for some mid-latitude rivers (Milliman et al., 2008), where water and sediment discharges to the sea have altered by an order of magnitude. Most of the world’s large rivers are dammed to generate power and regulate flow, in response to growing populations that have increased the demand for water (Dynesius and Nilsson, 1994, Milliman, 1997, Vörösmarty et al.

)-Norway spruce forests of northern Sweden, however, these mountain forests have experienced a natural fire return interval of 210–510 years ( Carcaillet et al., 2007) with generally no significant influence of pre-historic anthropogenic activities on fire occurrence. In more recent times (from AD 1650), fire frequency generally increased with increasing human population and pressure, until the late 1800s when the influence of fire decreased dramatically due to the development of timber exploitation ( Granström

and Niklasson, 2008). Feathermosses and dwarf shrubs normally recolonize these

locales some 20–40 years after fire and ultimately dominate the forest bottom layer approximately selleck chemicals 100 years after fire (DeLuca et al., 2002a, DeLuca click here et al., 2002b and Zackrisson et al., 2004). Two feathermosses, in particular, Pleurozium schreberi (Brid) Mitt. with some Hylocomium splendens (Hedw.), harbor N fixing cyanobacteria which restore N pools lost during fire events ( DeLuca et al., 2008, DeLuca et al., 2002a, DeLuca et al., 2002b, Zackrisson et al., 2009 and Zackrisson et al., 2004). However, shrubs, feathermosses or pines have not successfully colonized these spruce-Cladina forests. The mechanism for the continued existence of the open spruce forests and lichen dominated understory remains unclear; however, it has been hypothesized that depletion

of nutrients with frequent recurrent fire may make it impossible for these species to recolonize next these sites ( Tamm, 1991). Fires cause the volatilization of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) retained in the soil organic horizons and in the surface mineral soil (Neary et al., 2005). Recurrent fires applied by humans to manage vegetation were likely lower severity fires than those allowed to burn on their natural return interval (Arno and Fiedler, 2005); however, nutrients would continue to be volatilized from the remaining live and dead fuels (Neary et al., 1999). It is possible that the loss of these nutrients has led to the inability of this forest to regenerate as a pine, feathermoss dominated ecosystem (Hörnberg et al., 1999); however, this hypothesis has never been tested. The purpose of the work reported herein was to evaluate whether historical use of fire as a land management tool led to a long-term depletion of nutrients and organic matter in open spruce-Cladina forests of subarctic Sweden.

0 earthquake and the subsequent tsunami that occurred on 11 March 2011 (Simons et al., 2011), the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP)

underwent a series of serious damages (Burns et al., 2012). After failure of the cooling systems, several hydrogen explosions affected three of the six nuclear reactors of the power plant on March 12, 14 and 15, and affected a fourth reactor which had already been stopped (Achim et al., 2012). Significant quantities of radionuclides were released into the environment between 12 and 31 March (Morino et al., 2013). Radioactive substance quantities released by the FDNPP accident were estimated to reach 11–40% (190–700 PBq) of the Sirolimus total amount of 131I and 14–62% (12–53.1 PBq) of the total 137Cs emitted by Chernobyl accident (Chino et al., 2011, Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, 2011, IRSN, 2012, Stohl et al., 2012 and Winiarek et al., 2012). Despite the bulk of radionuclides (∼80%) were transported offshore and out over the Pacific Ocean (Buesseler et al., 2011 and Masson et al., 2011), significant wet and dry deposits of those radionuclides Selleck BMS354825 occurred predominantly in Fukushima Prefecture on 15–16 March, leading to a strong contamination of soils (Yasunari et al., 2011 and Kinoshita et al., 2011). In particular, 6.4 PBq of 137Cs (∼20% of the total emissions) were modelled to have deposited on Japanese soils (Stohl et al.,

2012) over a distance of 70 km to the northwest of FDNPP (Fig. 1a). Soils characterized by a 137Cs contamination exceeding 100 kBq m−2 cover ca. 3000 km2

(MEXT, 2011). When reaching such see more high levels, radioactive contamination constitutes a real threat for the local populations. Resulting radiations lead to an external exposure threat that depends on the spatial distribution of radionuclides and the time of exposition (Endo et al., 2012 and Garnier-Laplace et al., 2011). This threat, associated with the possibility of transfer of contamination to plants, animals and direct ingestion of contaminated particles, will affect human activities such as agriculture, forest exploitation and fishing for long periods of time, depending on the half-life of the radionuclides (e.g., 2 yrs for 134Cs; 30 yrs for 137Cs). Those latter substances are strongly sorbed by soil particles (and especially by their clay, silt and organic matter fractions) and may therefore be delivered to rivers by runoff and erosion processes triggered on hillslopes (Motha et al., 2002, Tamura, 1964 and Whitehead, 1978). This sediment may then further convey contaminants in rivers, and its transfer can lead to the dispersion of radioactive contamination across larger areas over time (Rogowski and Tamura, 1965 and Simpson et al., 1976). To our knowledge, those transfers following the FDNPP releases have only been investigated at the scale of individual fields (e.g. Koarashi et al., 2012) or in very small catchments of northeastern Japan (Ueda et al., 2013).

As evident from changes in k, N2 flux rates, R, and ergosterol content, streams would become more impaired when leaf decomposition rates increased and nutrient cycling rates slowed. The multivariate stream benthic group correlated with the multivariate landscape group but did not correlate with stream water quality and DOM groups. At least during the time of this study, the landscape provided a better measured of organic matter decomposition and associated processes than water column parameters. These landscape differences in benthic

stream function, however, more strongly link among stream patterns than within stream functional responses to a golf course. PS-341 cost The directional benthic response to golf course facilities was linked to the percent anthropogenic land use

in the riparian zone of the watershed rather than individual land use and covers. Golf course can provide refuge habitat for aquatic organisms in urban and agricultural settings (e.g., Colding et al., 2009 and Tanner and Gange, 2005) and under those management goals can be considered beneficial landscape features. The role of golf courses in intensively developed this website areas, however, might not be as clear cut. Our findings suggested that the environmental impact of golf course facilities depends on the parameters used to access the impact, the land use and cover in the stream’s watershed, and the overall human disturbance in the watershed. Golf course facilities were able to recover some benthic stream function when human land use was around 50%, but did not benefit streams that had >60% anthropogenic land use in the riparian zone of their watershed. The varied impact of a landscape feature that many citizens inherently expect to negatively impact water resources points to the need for a greater understanding of how watersheds respond to specific land uses within the broader disturbed landscape (Yates and P-type ATPase Bailey, 2010).The starting conditions in Ontario streams depended on the mixture of human land use and natural land covers within the watershed. The varied directional and magnitude response to golf course facilities

by benthic parameters, however, was strongly linked to the overall human land use, regardless of the type. Stream benthic organic matter cycles could, therefore, have a consistent mechanistic response to golf course facilities based on the overall human landscape of the stream. We suggest that golf course facilities contribute organic matter and nutrients in a proportion that can help restore slower rates of organic matter decomposition in moderately human impacted watersheds, but under high levels of human impact golf course inputs enhance organic matter decomposition. Future studies could better explore this topic and hypothesis by controlling for stream size, seasonality, and the land use and cover in the upstream watershed.

The authors are among those who have made significant contributions to this scholarship, and they draw very effectively on a wide range of information in telling the story of the Santa Cruz. The book starts with a description of the physical setting of the drainage basin, including geologic history, Holocene arroyo formation, climate and hydroclimatology, riparian ecosystems, and prehistory. This description is followed by

a chapter discussing the potential causes of historic arroyo downcutting and filling during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The bulk of the book is devoted to a detailed description GSI-IX of historic changes occurring on the Santa Cruz River during the period from Spanish settlement to river restoration measures in 2012, when wastewater effluent created perennial flow in some portions of the river and sustained a riparian ecosystem. The authors use historical and, to a lesser extent, geological and paleoecological data, to reconstruct the physical and cultural conditions in the region during the past three centuries, a period that includes a time Selleckchem AZD5363 of substantial arroyo downcutting. This channel downcutting is the primary historical change emphasized in the book, but physical channel changes are presented in the context of biotic and human communities along the river.

The authors carefully describe the riverine characteristics before arroyo downcutting, how and when the arroyos formed,

and the continuing effects of the arroyos on contemporary floodplain management. The book also focuses on the historical existence of the Great Mesquite Forest. This riparian forest included such large, old cottonwood and mesquite trees that numerous historical sources comment on its characteristics. The forest, which covered at least 2000 ha, began to decline during the 1930s and 1940s as a result of water table declines associated with groundwater withdrawal, and crossed a threshold of irreversible to loss by the early 1970s. The main text concludes with a summary of past riverine changes and a discussion of some possible river futures. A series of appendices following the main text includes lists of historical and contemporary species of birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and plants along the river, as well as threatened and endangered species, and ornithologists who have studied bird communities along the river. The appendices are followed by extensive end notes and references. This book tells a complicated story. As the authors explain, the historical Santa Cruz River was mostly dry between floods except for relatively short spring-fed reaches. This condition contrasts with the romanticized view that has become popular, of a perennial historical river that created ‘a land of milk and honey’ in the midst of the Sonoran Desert. This is one simplistic view of past river environments.

The discussants considered not only the various regulatory systems that govern animal care and use, but also the emergence of private party actions to intervene in the enforcement of regulations and the increasing use of freedom of information approaches, such as federal and state “sunshine” legislation in the United States, to seek information about animal care and use (Institute of Medicine, 2012). While not representing a total consensus of all the workshop’s

participants, some important messages emerged during the presentations and subsequent discussions. Key among these was the need for a strong regulatory and institutional compliance framework to ensure that the use of animals in research is ethically secure and legally sound and to provide confidence in public communication about, and defense of, the research. At the same time, delegates were concerned to Depsipeptide concentration selleck chemicals llc avoid placing unnecessary constraints on important neuroscience research. The scientific study of living organisms is critical if we are to understand both life on earth and the diseases and disorders that we cannot yet treat or prevent. Since all living organisms have a common origin and all vertebrates

share a large fraction of their genes and a wide range of cellular mechanisms, we have already learned a great deal about the principles of human biology and behavior from animal models and can hope to learn more. Moreover, advances in veterinary care also depend crucially on understanding gained from the study of animals. A common feature of animal research

legislation around the world is that animals may be used for some experimental procedures that would not be acceptable in humans. These include manipulation of the environment, the genetics, or the selleck kinase inhibitor bodies of the animals. Nevertheless, it must be appreciated that the use of animals in neuroscience research raises particularly sharp ethical issues. The fact that many harrowing disorders of the nervous system, such as dementias, Parkinson’s disease, and motor neuron disorders, are increasing in prevalence and are not adequately treatable heightens the potential benefits of such research. But for the same reasons, neuroscience research often involves the creation of such distressing conditions in animals, or the manipulation of their experience, in ways that highlight the potential ethical costs of animal research. As neuroscience research moves forward, there is likely to be a continuing reliance on animal models. This likelihood must not be concealed in discussions with politicians, the media, the public, or with groups that oppose animal use. But this should not preclude grasping opportunities to implement the 3Rs: indeed any continuing need to use animals simply raises the moral imperative to optimize welfare and to search for every way to reduce suffering.

New reconstructions are regularly added to the database. Original digital tracing files received from contributors are processed to generate

a standardized SWC format, 2D image, and 3D animation of the morphology. The original, standardized, and rendered files are all freely downloadable along with log files reporting changes enacted in the conversion process and detailed notes. Each reconstruction in NeuroMorpho.Org is further annotated with ON-01910 purchase rich information including animal strain, age, gender, weight, histological protocol, staining method, and microscopy technique. Moreover, all morphologies are associated with their corresponding PubMed references. In turn, PubMed abstracts of publications whose morphologies are deposited in NeuroMorpho.Org enable direct “linkout” access to the digital reconstructions from the database. Clear terms of use ensure that contributors are appropriately cited when their data are downloaded and used in published studies. Reconstructions posted on NeuroMorpho.Org have been utilized in over 120 peer-reviewed publications. More than 2.4 million files have been downloaded Selleck PLX4032 in the past six years in over 100,000 visits from 125 countries.

NeuroMorpho.Org also maintains extensive literature coverage of publications containing neuromorphological tracings since the inception of digital reconstruction technology ( Halavi et al., 2012). Publications can be perused by entering the PubMed identifier and browsed by reconstruction information,

year of publication, or availability status of the described data ( Figure 5). Figure 5.  Literature Database of References Reporting Digital Reconstructions of Neuronal Morphology Several laboratories maintain publicly available databases of reconstructions from their own studies. These include the collections of Drs. Alexander Borst (www.neuro.mpg.de/30330/borst_modelfly_downloads), Brenda Claiborne (utsa.edu/claibornelab), Alain Destexhe (http://cns.iaf.cnrs-gif.fr/alain_geometries.html), Attila Gulyas (www.koki.hu/∼gulyas/ca1cells), Patrick Hof (research.mssm.edu/cnic/repository), Gregory Jefferis (flybrain.stanford.edu), William Kath (dendrites.esam.northwestern.edu), Dennis Turner (www.compneuro.org/CDROM/nmorph), and Rafael Yuste (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/faculty/yuste/databases). Oxygenase These databases are mirrored into NeuroMorpho.Org for centralized access to all reconstructions and associated metadata. The Virtual Neuromorphology Electronic Database (krasnow1.gmu.edu/cn3/L-Neuron/database) contains virtual models of neuronal morphology generated with the L-Neuron program (see Computational Modeling), which can also be reanalyzed or employed for biophysical simulations of electrophysiology. The Invertebrate Brain Platform (invbrain.neuroinf.jp; Ikeno et al., 2008) is a repository of confocal images and electrical responses of neurons in systems including honeybee, silkworm, cockroach, and crayfish.

, 2005). The firing fields formed a grid-like pattern, and the cells were referred to as grid cells (Figure 1). The size of each grid field and the spacing between them were Tenofovir research buy found to increase progressively from small in dorsal to large in ventral MEC (Fyhn et al., 2004, Hafting et al., 2005 and Sargolini et al., 2006). At the dorsal tip, the spacing was approximately 30 cm in the rat; at the ventral tip, it was more

than 3 m (Brun et al., 2008). The position of the grid vertices in the x,y plane (their grid phase) appeared to vary randomly between cells at all dorsoventral locations, but each grid maintained a stable grid phase over time. The cells fired at the same x,y positions irrespective of changes in the animal’s speed and direction, and the firing fields persisted in darkness, suggesting that self-motion

information is used actively by grid cells to keep track of the animal’s position in the environment (Hafting et al., 2005 and McNaughton et al., 2006). This process, referred to as path integration, may provide the metric this website component of the spatial map. Grid cells were soon found to colocalize with several other specialized cell types. A substantial portion of the principal cells in layer III and layers V and VI of the MEC were tuned to direction, firing if and only if the animal’s head faced a certain angle relative to its immediate surroundings (Sargolini et al., 2006). Similar cells were already known to exist in other parahippocampal and subcortical regions (Ranck, 1985 and Taube, 2007), but the entorhinal head direction cells were different in that many of them exhibited grid-like activity at the same time (conjunctive grid × head direction cells). In addition, approximately 10% of the active entorhinal cell population was found to fire selectively in the vicinity of geometric borders such

as the walls of a recording enclosure or the edges of a table (Savelli et al., 2008 and Solstad et al., 2008). We have referred to these cells as border cells (Solstad others et al., 2008). Collectively, grid cells, head direction cells, and border cells are thought to form the neural basis of a metric representation of allocentric space (Moser et al., 2008). The entorhinal spatial representation is different from the hippocampal map in that cell assemblies maintain their intrinsic firing structure across environments. If two grid cells have similar vertices in one environment, they will fire at similar locations also in another environment (Fyhn et al., 2007 and Hafting et al., 2005). If two border cells fire along adjacent borders in one enclosure, they will do so in other boxes, too (Solstad et al., 2008). In the hippocampus, in contrast, different subsets of neurons are recruited in different environments (Muller et al.

, 2008 and Freeman et al., 2011). For an active observer in the natural world, objects are fundamentally physical entities. As such, an intrinsic but surprisingly overlooked property of any object is its real-world

size (Konkle and Oliva, 2011). The size of objects in the world has consequences for both the nature of the objects and our experiences with them. For example, gravity and the laws of physics impose specific constrains on the shape and material properties of objects of different sizes. If an object R428 nmr is simply scaled up in size, the increased weight per unit surface area will cause objects with insufficient material strength to collapse, and many natural objects tend to have optimized proportions that are neither overly strong or weak for their size (Haldane, 1928 and Gordan, 1981). Additionally, the physical size of objects in the world dictates how we interact with them: we pick up small objects like strawberries and paperclips, but we sit in and move around large objects like sofas and fountains. Thus different-sized objects have different action demands and typical interaction distances. Given these constraints of the physical world on the properties of objects and how we experience them, we hypothesized that object representations may be naturally differentiated by their real-world size, reflected in a coarse

spatial organization across occipitotemporal selleck chemical cortex. In the current study, we compared the cortical response to big and small real-world objects. We specifically focused on the representations of everyday inanimate these objects, excluding faces, bodies, animals, and classically defined tools. These everyday objects often get grouped together as “other objects” (e.g., see Hasson et al., 2003 and Op de Beeck et al., 2008) and are known to have a distributed activation

pattern across a large swath of ventral-temporal cortex. Here, we examined whether voxels along this cortex showed a preference for objects of big or small real-world sizes. One possibility is that big and small object preferences would be weak and heterogeneously distributed, in a “salt-and-pepper” organization that is not consistent across people. Instead, we observe that there are strong differential responses to big and small objects, and these preferences are grouped spatially in a medial-to-lateral arrangement across the ventral surface of cortex. This organization of object information is mirrored along the lateral surface, with an inferior-to-superior arrangement of small-to-big object information. Within this organization, we find reliable spatially clustered regions that show peaks of differential selectivity to big and small objects, evident at the single-subject level. We thus characterized the responses in these new functional regions-of-interest to examine the nature of the object representations.