Both lower-level stimulus factors (e.g., temporal proximity) and higher-level cognitive factors (e.g., content congruency) are known to influence multisensory integration. The former can direct attention in a converging manner, and the latter can indicate whether information from the two modalities belongs together. The present research investigated whether and how these two factors interacted ...

Circadian behavior in mammals is coordinated by neurons within the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). In this issue, Lee et al. (2015) and Mieda et al. (2015) applied state-of-the-art genetic tools to dissect the microcircuits within the SCN generating circadian rhythmic behavior.

Neuroethologists try to assign behavioral functions to certain brain centers, if possible down to individual neurons and to the expression of specific genes. This approach has been successfully applied for the control of circadian rhythmic behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Several so-called "clock genes" are expressed in specific neurons in the lateral and dorsal brain where th...

Adults who engage in synchronous movement to music later report liking each other better, remembering more about each other, trusting each other more, and are more likely to cooperate with each other compared to adults who engage in asynchronous movements. Although poor motor coordination limits infants' ability to entrain to a musical beat, they perceive metrical structure in auditory rhythm p...

The purposes of this study were to examine the relationships between various force-time parameters and muscle oxygenation kinetics during maximal sustained isometric grip (SIG) and maximal repeated rhythmic grips (RRG) with different grip intervals (interval times: 5, 4, 3, and 2 s). Subjects were 10 healthy young males, aged 20-26 years (height 173.9+/-7.3 cm, body mass 71.5+/-11.2 kg). After ...

Entrainment has been studied in a variety of contexts including music perception, dance, verbal communication and motor coordination more generally. Here we seek to provide a unifying framework that incorporates the key aspects of entrainment as it has been studied in these varying domains. We propose that there are a number of types of entrainment that build upon pre-existing adaptations that ...

Although molecular components of the circadian clock are known, mechanisms that transmit signals from the clock and produce rhythmic behavior are poorly understood. We find that the microRNA miR-279 regulates the JAK/STAT pathway to drive rest:activity rhythms in Drosophila. Overexpression of microRNA miR-279 or miR-279 deletion attenuates rest:activity rhythms. Oscillations of the clock protei...

In this issue of Neuron, Deschênes et al. (2016) propose that rhythmic inhibition of whisker motor neurons is a key pattern generator underlying exploratory whisking. The inhibitory premotor neurons located in the brainstem reticular formation are synchronized by breathing-related oscillators.

Circadian rhythms with a period of ~24 h, are natural timing machines. They are broadly distributed in living organisms, such as Neurospora, Drosophila, and mammals. The underlying natures of the rhythmic behavior have been explored by experimental and theoretical approaches. However, the global and physical natures of the oscillation under fluctuations are still not very clear. We developed a ...

As long as we only focus on kinematics, rhythmic movement appears to be a concatenation of discrete movements or discrete movement appears to be a truncated rhythmic movement. However, whether or not the neural control processes of discrete and rhythmic movements are distinct has not yet been clearly understood. Here, we address this issue by examining the motor learning transfer between these ...