THE NATURE RESEARCH JOURNALS PRESS RELEASE
For papers that will be published online on 18 June 2006
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This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
- Predicting other’s actions starts young – Nature Neuroscience
- Tuning out the noise – Nature Neuroscience
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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**********************NATURE NEUROSCIENCE ***********************
(http://www.nature.com/natureneuroscience)
[1] Predicting other’s actions starts young
DOI: 10.1038/nn1729
Babies as young as one can learn to predict the outcome of another person’s actions as well as adults can, according to a study in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience. These findings suggest that infants learn to predict the actions of others roughly when they learn to perform those actions themselves.
Terje Falck-Ytter and colleagues tracked the eye movements of babies at 6 months or 12 months and of adults, while the subjects watched video clips of an actor’s hand placing toys into a bucket. After repeated presentations of the video, both adults and 12-month-old babies looked at the bucket before the hand reached it, predicting the goal of the movement. In contrast, 6-month olds did not shift gaze to the bucket until the hand had arrived, suggesting that they could not predict the outcome of the action they saw. Infants first learn to perform actions like those presented in the experiment around 7 to 9 months of age, so these results suggest that social cognition may start to develop as early in life as motor skills.
Author contact:
Terje Falck-Ytter (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Tel: +46 18 47 12 125; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Tuning out the noise
DOI: 10.1038/nn1720
Over-exposure to irrelevant sounds can cause the brain to tune them out in favor of other auditory stimuli, reports a study in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience. This finding is surprising because previous work has suggested that exposure to certain sounds increases the brain’s response to them.
The authors exposed adolescent cats to random sequences of tones whose frequency varied within a fixed range, and then looked at the neural responses to the different frequencies in the cats’ auditory cortex. Following exposure, which lasted 24 hours a day for about 5 months, neurons in the cats’ auditory cortex showed much weaker responses to frequencies that had been present in the exposure stimulus. In contrast, responses to other frequencies were enhanced. The results suggest that overexposure to a stimulus can impair its representation in the brain.
The auditory stimulus in this case was of no relevance to the cats, and presumably was ignored. It remains to be seen what would happen with overexposure of behaviorally relevant stimuli.
Author contact:
Jos Eggermont (University of Calgary, Canada)
Tel: +1 403 220 5214; E-mail: [email protected]
Other papers from Nature Neuroscience to be published online at the same time and with the same embargo:
[3] Amygdala BDNF signaling is required for consolidation but not encoding of extinction
DOI: 10.1038/nn1718
[4] Optimal decision making and the anterior cingulate cortex
DOI: 10.1038/nn1724
[5] Role of hypothalamic Foxo1 in the regulation of food intake and energy homeostasis
DOI: 10.1038/nn1731
[6] The first neurons of the human cerebral cortex
DOI: 10.1038/nn1726
******************************************************************
Items from other Nature journals to be published online at the same time and with the same embargo:
NATURE MATERIALS (http://www.nature.com/naturematerials)
[7] Magnetic behaviour of layered Ag(II) fluorides
DOI: 10.1038/nmat1670
[8] High rate capabilities Fe3O4-based Cu nano-architectured electrodes for lithium-ion battery applications
DOI: 10.1038/nmat1672
[9] Electronically coupled complementary interfaces between perovskite band insulators
DOI: 10.1038/nmat1675
[10] Structural properties of <111> B-oriented III–V nanowires
DOI: 10.1038/nmat1677
Nature MEDICINE (http://www.nature.com/naturemedicine)
[11] Tetraspanins on the surface of Schistosoma mansoni are protective antigens against schistosomiasis
DOI: 10.1038/nm1430
[12] Conditional ablation of Stat3 or Socs3 discloses a dual role for reactive astrocytes after spinal cord injury
DOI: 10.1038/nm1425
NATURE GENETICS (http://www.nature.com/naturegenetics)
[13] PLA2G6, encoding a phospholipase A2, is mutated in neurodegenerative disorders with high brain iron
DOI: 10.1038/ng1826
[14] Pleiotropic fitness effects of the Tre1-Gr5a region in Drosophila melanogaster
DOI: 10.1038/ng1823
[15] A genetic signature of interspecies variations in gene expression
DOI: 10.1038/ng1819
[16] An inherited mutation leading to production of only the short isoform of GATA-1 is associated with impaired erythropoiesis
DOI: 10.1038/ng1825
NATURE CELL BIOLOGY (http://www.nature.com/naturecellbiology)
[17] Regulation of mitotic entry by microcephalin and its overlap with ATR signalling
DOI: 10.1038/ncb1431
[18] Activation of the DExD/H-box protein Dbp5 by the nuclear-pore protein Gle1 and its coactivator InsP6 is required for mRNA export
DOI: 10.1038/ncb1424
[19] Inositol hexakisphosphate and Gle1 activate the DEAD-box protein Dbp5 for nuclear mRNA export
DOI: 10.1038/ncb1427
Nature STRUCTURAL & MOLECULAR BIOLOGY (http://www.nature.com/natstructmolbiol)
[20] Molecular basis for the inhibition of human NMPRTase, a novel target for anticancer agents
DOI: 10.1038/nsmb1105
[21] Structure of Nampt/PBEF/visfatin, a mammalian NAD+ biosynthetic enzyme
DOI: 10.1038/nsmb1114
[22] Cis-preferential LINE-1 reverse transcriptase activity in ribonucleoprotein particles
DOI: 10.1038/nsmb1107
[23] Disorder-order folding transitions underlie catalysis in the helicase motor of SecA
DOI: 10.1038/nsmb1108
[24] Nucleotide binding and hydrolysis induces a disorder-order transition in the kinesin neck-linker region
DOI: 10.1038/nsmb1109
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GEOGRAPHICAL LISTING OF AUTHORS
The following list of places refers to the whereabouts of authors on the papers numbered in this release. The listing may be for an author's main affiliation, or for a place where they are working temporarily. Please see the PDF of the paper for full details.
AUSTRALIA
Brisbane: 11
BELGIUM
Antwerp: 9
BRAZIL
Belo Horizonte: 11
Sao Paulo: 16
CANADA
Calgary: 2
FRANCE
Amiens: 8
Lyon: 2
Paris: 13
Toulouse: 8
GERMANY
Berlin: 7
GREECE
Crete: 23
ISRAEL
Rehovot: 15
ITALY
Milan: 13
Rome: 13
Verona: 13
JAPAN
Fukuoka: 12
Saitama: 12
Tokyo: 12
JORDAN
Amman: 13
KOREA
Seoul: 5
RUSSIA
St Petersburg: 6
SWEDEN
Lund: 10
Uppsala: 1
THE NETHERLANDS
Enschede: 9
TURKEY
Ankara: 14
Bursa: 13
UNITED KINGDOM
Birmingham: 13
Cambridge: 13
Didcot: 7
East Sussex: 17
Edinburgh: 17
Fife: 7
London: 13
Oxford: 4, 6
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Berkeley: 4, 18
San Francisco: 13
Connecticut
New Haven: 6
Delaware
Wilmington: 13
District of Columbia
Washington: 11
Georgia
Atlanta: 3
Maryland
Baltimore: 21
Massachusetts
Boston: 5
Michigan
Ann Arbor: 22
Missouri
St Louis: 21
New Jersey
Newark: 23
New Mexico
Los Alamos: 7
New York
Bronx: 24
New York: 20
North Carolina
Raleigh: 14
Ohio
Columbus: 7
Oregon
Portland: 13
Tennessee
Knoxville: 7
Nashville: 18, 19
Oak Ridge: 7
PRESS CONTACTS…
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For media inquiries relating to editorial content/policy for the Nature Research Journals, please contact the journals individually:
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Bernd Pulverer
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Nature Genetics (New York)
Orli Bahcall
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Nature Immunology (New York)
Laurie Dempsey
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Nature Materials (London)
Maria Bellantone
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Nature Medicine (New York)
Juan Carlos Lopez
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Nature Neuroscience (New York)
Sandra Aamodt (based in California)
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Nature Physics (London)
Alison Wright
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