Mechanisms of cerebellar motor learning are still poorly understood. The standard Marr-Albus-Ito theory posits that learning involves plasticity at the parallel fiber to Purkinje cell synapses under control of the climbing fiber input, which provides an error signal as in classical supervised learning paradigms. However, a growing body of evidence challenges this theory, in that additional site...

Hereditary, environmental, and stochastic factors determine a child's growth in his unique environment, but their relative contribution to the phenotypic outcome and the extent of stochastic programming that is required to alter human phenotypes is not known because few data are available. This is an attempt to use evolutionary life-history theory in understanding child growth in a broad evolut...

UNLABELLED This review attempts to use evolutionary life-history theory in understanding child growth in a broad evolutionary perspective. It uses the data and theory of evolutionary predictive adaptive strategies for transition from one life-history phase to the next, and the inherent adaptive plasticity in the timing of such transitions. Humans evolved to withstand energy crises by decreasing...

Organisms express phenotypic plasticity during social interactions. Interacting phenotype theory has explored the consequences of social plasticity for evolution, but it is unclear how this theory applies to complex social structures. We adapt interacting phenotype models to general social structures to explore how the number of social connections between individuals and preference for phenotyp...

We consider a fully connected network of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons with spike-timing-dependent plasticity. The plasticity is controlled by a parameter representing the expected weight of a synapse between neurons that are firing randomly with the same mean frequency. For low values of the plasticity parameter, the activities of the system are dominated by noise, while large values of the...

The cerebellum aids the learning and execution of fast coordinated movements, with acquired information being stored by plasticity of parallel fibre–Purkinje cell synapses. According to the current consensus, erroneously active parallel fibre synapses are depressed by complex spikes arising as climbing fibres signal movement errors. However, this theory cannot solve the credit assignment proble...

An ongoing new synthesis in evolutionary theory is expanding our view of the sources of heritable variation beyond point mutations of fixed phenotypic effects to include environmentally sensitive changes in gene regulation. This expansion of the paradigm is necessary given ample evidence for a heritable ability to alter gene expression in response to environmental cues. In consequence, single g...

Early life experiences can have profound and persistent effects on traits expressed throughout the life course, with consequences for later life behavior, disease risk, and mortality rates. The shaping of later life traits by early life environments, known as 'developmental plasticity', has been well-documented in humans and non-human animals, and has consequently captured the attention of both...

It is a long-established fact that neuronal plasticity occupies the central role in generating neural function and computation. Nevertheless, no unifying account exists of how neurons in a recurrent cortical network learn to compute on temporally and spatially extended stimuli. However, these stimuli constitute the norm, rather than the exception, of the brain's input. Here, we introduce a geom...