Children vary in the extent to which their development is shaped by particular experiences (e.g. maltreatment, social support). This variation raises a question: Is there no single level of plasticity that maximizes biological fitness? One influential hypothesis states that when different levels of plasticity are optimal in different environmental states and the environment fluctuates unpredict...

GOALS OF THIS CHAPTER 2 PRINCIPLES OF DEVELOPMENTAL NEUROSCIENCE AND DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 3 THE BRAIN AS A DYNAMIC, SELF-ORGANIZING DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEM 3 SELF-ORGANIZATION 4 THE DEVELOPING BRAIN 4 EXPERIENCE AND BRAIN DEVELOPMENT 6 Mechanisms of Neural Plasticity 7 Neural Plasticity: Historical Aspect 9 Neurobiological Pathways to Psychopathology 13 Social Experience and Brain Develop...

Synaptic plasticity is fundamental in shaping the output of neural networks. The transformation of synaptic plasticity at the cellular level into plasticity at the system level involves multiple factors, including behavior of local networks of interneurons. Here we investigate the synaptic to system transformation for plasticity in motor output in an in vitro preparation of the adult mouse spin...

Phenotypic plasticity, the capacity of a single genotype to exhibit variable phenotypes in different environments, is common in insects and is often highly adaptive. Virtually any abiotic or biotic factor can serve to induce plasticity, and resulting changes vary from harmful susceptibilities to highly integrated and adaptive alternative phenotypes. Numerous physiological mechanisms accomplish ...

Ashhad S, Johnston D, Narayanan R. Activation of InsP3 receptors is sufficient for inducing graded intrinsic plasticity in rat hippocampal pyramidal neurons. J Neurophysiol 113: 2002–2013, 2015. First published December 31, 2014; doi:10.1152/jn.00833.2014.— The synaptic plasticity literature has focused on establishing necessity and sufficiency as two essential and distinct features in causally...

Many forms of synaptic plasticity require the local production of volatile or rapidly diffusing substances such as nitric oxide. The nonspecific plasticity these neuromodulators may induce at neighboring non-active synapses is thought to be detrimental for the specificity of memory storage. We show here that memory retrieval may benefit from this non-specific plasticity when the applied sparse ...

Despite an abundance of computational models for learning of synaptic weights, there has been relatively little research on structural plasticity, i.e., the creation and elimination of synapses. Especially, it is not clear how structural plasticity works in concert with spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) and what advantages their combination offers. Here we present a fairly large-scale fu...

Abstract This paper reports the fabrication of an artificial synapse (AS) based on two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) film. The AS emulates important synaptic functions such as paired-pulse facilitation, spike-rate dependent plasticity, spike-duration plasticity and spike-number plasticity. spike voltage can mediate ion migration in gel to regulate conductance MoS channel, thereby re...

T he hypothesis that learning memory and some aspects of development are mechanistically implemented by synaptic plasticity has gained significant experimental support (1, 2). At the cellular and molecular level synaptic plasticity is a very complex phenomenon, involving hundreds of molecular species, depending on the structure of dendrites and on ion channel concentrations. If we are to unders...

The connectivity of the brain is continuously adjusted to new environmental influences by several activity-dependent adaptive processes. The most investigated adaptive mechanism is activity-dependent functional or synaptic plasticity regulating the transmission efficacy of existing synapses. Another important but less prominently discussed adaptive process is structural plasticity, which change...