Copyright © 2020 Broadhead and Miles.The cortex is crucial for many behaviors, ranging from sensory-based behaviors to working memory and social behaviors. To gain an in-depth understanding of the contribution to these behaviors, cellular and sub-cellular recordings from both individual and populations of cortical neurons are vital. However, techniques allowing such recordings, such as two-photon imaging and whole-cell electrophysiology, require absolute stability of the head, a requirement not often fulfilled in freely moving animals. Here, we review and compare behavioral paradigms that have been developed and adapted for the head-fixed preparation, which together offer the needed stability for live recordings of neural activity in behaving animals. We also review how the head-fixed preparation has been used to explore the function of primary sensory cortices, posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and anterior lateral motor (ALM) cortex in sensory-based behavioral tasks, while also discussing the considerations of performing such recordings. Overall, this review highlights the head-fixed preparation as allowing in-depth investigation into the neural activity underlying behaviors by providing highly controllable settings for precise stimuli presentation which can be combined with behavioral paradigms ranging from simple sensory detection tasks to complex, cross-modal, memory-guided decision-making tasks. Copyright © 2020 Bjerre and Palmer.Activity and expression of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) catalytic isoform, PIK3CD/p110δ, is increased in schizophrenia, autism, and intellectual delay and pro-cognitive preclinical efficacy of p110δ-inhibition has been demonstrated in pharmacological, genetic, and developmental rodent models of psychiatric disorders. Although PI3K signaling has been implicated in the development and function of neurons and glia; isoform-specific roles of the individual PI3Ks are less clear and the biological effects of increased p110δ on neuronal development are unknown. Since the pathobiological direction of p110δ changes in neurodevelopmental disorders are increased expression and activity, we hypothesized that overexpression of p110δ would impact measures of neuronal development and maturation relevant to connectivity and synaptic transmission. p110δ overexpression in primary rat hippocampal cultures significantly reduced dendritic morphogenesis and arborization and increased immature and mature dendritic spine densities, without impacting cell viability, soma size, or axon length. Together, our novel findings demonstrate the importance of homeostatic regulation of the p110δ isoform for normative neuronal development and highlight a potential pathophysiological mechanism of association to disorders of neurodevelopment. DiR compound library chemical Copyright © 2020 Hood, Paterson and Law.Since the discovery of TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (TDP-43) in 1995, our understanding of its role continues to expand as research progresses. In particular, its role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has drawn increasing interest in recent years. TDP-43 may participate in various pathogenic mechanisms underlying AD, such as amyloid β deposition, tau hyperphosphorylation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and neuroinflammation. Because AD is complex and heterogeneous, and because of the distinct characteristics of TDP-43, mostly seen in the oldest-old and those with more severe clinical phenotype, subcategorization based on specific features or biomarkers may significantly improve diagnosis and treatment. AD-like cognitive dysfunction associated with TDP-43 pathology may therefore be a distinct encephalopathy, referred to as limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE). Copyright © 2020 Huang, Zhou, Tu, Ba, Huang, Huang and Luo.Several approaches can be used to estimate neural activity. The main differences between them concern the a priori information used and its sensitivity to high noise levels. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) has been recently applied to electroencephalography EEG-based neural activity reconstruction to provide a priori time-frequency information to improve the estimation of neural activity. EMD has the specific ability to identify independent oscillatory modes in non-stationary signals with multiple oscillatory components. However, attempts to use EMD in EEG analysis have not yet provided optimal reconstructions, due to the intrinsic mode-mixing problem of EMD. Several studies have used single-channel analysis, whereas others have used multiple-channel analysis for other applications. Here, we present the results of multiple-channel analysis using multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) to reduce the mode-mixing problem and provide useful a priori time-frequency information for the reconstruction of neuronal activity using several low-density EEG electrode montages. The methods were evaluated using real and synthetic EEG data, in which the reconstructions were performed using the multiple sparse priors (MSP) algorithm with EEG electrode montages of 32, 16, and 8 electrodes. The quality of the source reconstruction was assessed using the Wasserstein metric. A comparison of the solutions without pre-processing and those after applying MEMD showed the source reconstructions to be improved using MEMD as a priori information for the low-density montages of 8 and 16 electrodes. The mean source reconstruction error on a real EEG dataset was reduced by 59.42 and 66.04% for the 8 and 16 electrode montages, respectively, and that on a simulated EEG with three active sources, by 87.31 and 31.45% for the same electrode montages. Copyright © 2020 Soler, Muñoz-Gutiérrez, Bueno-López, Giraldo and Molinas.We investigated whether the categorical perception (CP) of speech might also provide a mechanism that aids its perception in noise. We varied signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) [clear, 0 dB, -5 dB] while listeners classified an acoustic-phonetic continuum (/u/ to /a/). Noise-related changes in behavioral categorization were only observed at the lowest SNR. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) differentiated category vs. category-ambiguous speech by the P2 wave (~180-320 ms). Paralleling behavior, neural responses to speech with clear phonetic status (i.e., continuum endpoints) were robust to noise down to -5 dB SNR, whereas responses to ambiguous tokens declined with decreasing SNR. Results demonstrate that phonetic speech representations are more resistant to degradation than corresponding acoustic representations. Findings suggest the mere process of binning speech sounds into categories provides a robust mechanism to aid figure-ground speech perception by fortifying abstract categories from the acoustic signal and making the speech code more resistant to external interferences.