Neural circuits implicated in drug conditioning, craving and relapse overlap extensively with those involved in natural reward and reinforcement. To determine whether specificity could be detected in conditioned brain responses to drugs versus food, male outbred HSD:ICR mice were conditioned to a common environment using either 20 mg/kg cocaine (ip) or a familiar food (under food restriction). ...

Results from studies of observing responses have suggested that stimuli maintain observing owing to their special relationship to primary reinforcement (the conditioned-reinforcement hypothesis), and not because they predict the availability and nonavailability of reinforcement (the information hypothesis). The present article first reviews a study that challenges that conclusion and then repor...

In a traditional Business Intelligence (BI) system, power users serve less experienced casual users. Power users analyze and gather data requested by casual users, and produce the reports and visualizations that casual users base their decisions on. When data volumes and the usage frequency of a traditional BI system increase, power users have problems serving all the requests from casual users...

We present two novel music interaction systems developed for casual exploratory search. In casual search scenarios, users have an ill-defined information need and it is not clear how to determine relevance. We apply Bayesian inference using evidence of listening intent in these cases, allowing for a belief over a music collection to be inferred. The first system using this approach allows users...

An "infection," understood here in a very broad sense, can be propagated through the network of social contacts among individuals. These social contacts include both "close" contacts and "casual" encounters among individuals in transport, leisure, shopping, etc. Knowing the first through the study of the social networks is not a difficult task, but having a clear picture of the network of casua...

Studies of tumor models using syngeneic transplantation have advanced our understanding of tumor immunity, including both immune surveillance and evasion. Murine mammary carcinoma 4T1 cells secrete immunosuppressive soluble factors as demonstrated in splenocyte culture. Cultured primary splenocytes secrete IFN-γ, which was strikingly elevated when the cells were isolated from 4T1 tumor-bearing ...

BACKGROUND Learned safety is established by negatively correlating the occurrence of a neutral stimulus and a noxious stimulus, which renders the previously neutral stimulus a 'safety signal'. While the neurophysiological and molecular mechanisms have been characterized in mice, it is currently not known how the neural substrates involved compare between mice and people. METHODS Here we attem...

Small-conductance calcium-activated potassium channels (K(Ca)2) are essential components involved in the modulation of neuronal excitability, underlying learning and memory. Recent evidence suggests that K(Ca)2 channel activity reduces synaptic transmission in a postsynaptic NMDA receptor-dependent manner and is modulated by long-term potentiation. We used radioactive in situ hybridization and ...

A small subset of information visualization and the digital humanities focuses on casual users, that is, users in everyday, non-work contexts. The development of digital cultural heritage collections like Europeana.eu for the general public increases the importance of this user group. This position paper reviews parallel findings from both research fields on casual users, their goals and explor...