A bill approved in both houses of the California legislature would allow certified teachers six paid weeks of maternity leave.

The bill would have given public school teachers at least six weeks of paid maternity leave.

A special state panel in Wisconsin has rejected a financially strapped district's request to dissolve.

The firing of a black staff member for repeating the n-word while telling a black student not to use it underscores how uneasy many districts, schools, and educators are with handling the use of racist language in any context.

Hawaii teachers have joined the Red for Ed movement: Last week, dozens of teachers across the state staged a "walk-in" protest to spread awareness about what they see as a lack of funding for public schools.

Teachers are asking for support for a ballot measure that would put in place a property tax to fund schools.

Recent Census data finds households in the South and Midwest lagging those in other regions in access to remote learning technologies and learning interactions with teachers and family members.

With schools shut down, social distancing in place, and parents at home, after-school programs are laying off staff and switching gears to meet families' needs.

Dougherty County, a largely black school district in an region heavily affected by coronavirus, is no longer subject to desegregation orders first imposed in 1963.

A sea of red swept the capitals of North and South Carolina on Wednesday, as thousands of teachers turned out to demand higher pay and more school funding.

A collection of stories from the previous week that you may have missed.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has finally OK'd Florida's plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act. That means that single state, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, has gotten the go-ahead for its plan.

Florida's teachers are marching on Tallahassee today. Hard-working teachers deserve a big raise and talented teachers are profoundly underpaid. But teachers ought not overplay their hand, or they're likely to face a backlash of their own.

It's pretty obvious by now that many Democrats are growing increasingly uncomfortable supporting charter schools. But New Hampshire lawmakers have taken the unusual step of rejecting federal charter school grant money.

A collection of articles from this week that you may have missed.

A small group of science teachers in Missouri is using the coronavirus as a teachable moment that's aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards.

Mississippi, Arkansas, and New Mexico have the highest percentages of students who lack adequate home technology for remote learning.

Recent Census data finds households in the South and Midwest lagging those in other regions in access to remote learning technologies and learning interactions with teachers and family members.

The Winnipeg Jets claimed Kaapo Kahkonen off waivers from the Avalanche on Tuesday afternoon

Emma Lingan and Eric Cruikshank discuss Washington Capitals center Dylan Strome, the Bruins and Red Wings coaches, Kirill Kaprizov's next contract and much more.

With David Jiříček's future with the Columbus Blue Jackets up in the air, the question now becomes: Should the Blue Jackets move on from David Jiříček?

Poile, Nashville's first-ever general manager who retired in 2023, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame alongside former Predators captain Shea Weber.

The Bruins earned their best win of the season with a third period comeback vs. the Blues. Can this result serve as a turning point for Boston?

Tennessee won easily over Mississippi State. Indiana and BYU won nail-biters. So why did they jump over the Vols? We asked the CFP committee chair.

A collection of stories from the week that you may have missed.

Districts are reconfiguring services, offering hazard pay, and partnering with food banks to keep up with a growing, unprecedented demand for food services during the school shutdown.

A collection of stories from the week that you may have missed.

A collection of articles from this week that you may have missed.

Marie Pino, who taught generations of children in her Navajo community, died at 67. She had lost one of her sons, a school basketball coach, to coronavirus-related illness just weeks before; her husband, an emergency medical coordinator and pastor, died of the illness shortly after she did.

The switch to remote learning in rural New Mexico has left some students profoundly isolated—cut off from others and the grid by sheer distance.

A collection of short news stories from the last week.

A collection of stories you may have missed.

EAU CLAIRE— This weekend saw the first basketball games for Blugold men’s and women’s basketball during the Market & Johnson Blugold Tip-Off Tournament. The games were the first to be played at the Sonnentag Event Center, a part of the new $122 million multi-purpose facility which opened earlier this year. The event center has a capacity of 3,500 people for sporting events as compared to the ...

Yang Hu
Feb 24, 2021; 41:1699-1715
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Robbert Havekes
Dec 12, 2012; 32:18137-18149
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Corey M. Ziemba
Oct 16, 2024; 44:e0349242024-e0349242024
Systems/Circuits

Jesse J. Langille
Jul 3, 2019; 39:5244-5246
Journal Club

John M. Beggs
Dec 3, 2003; 23:11167-11177
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

As evidence mounts that the cardiac-sympathetic nervous system reacts to challenging cognitive settings, we ask if these responses are epiphenomenal companions or if there is evidence suggesting a more intertwined role of this system with cognitive function. Healthy male and female human participants performed an approach-avoidance paradigm, trading off monetary reward for painful electric shock, while we recorded simultaneous electroencephalographic and cardiac-sympathetic signals. Participants were reward sensitive but also experienced approach-avoidance "conflict" when the subjective appeal of the reward was near equivalent to the revulsion of the cost. Drift-diffusion model parameters suggested that participants managed conflict in part by integrating larger volumes of evidence into choices (wider decision boundaries). Late alpha-band (neural) dynamics were consistent with widening decision boundaries serving to combat reward sensitivity and spread attention more fairly to all dimensions of available information. Independently, wider boundaries were also associated with cardiac "contractility" (an index of sympathetically mediated positive inotropy). We also saw evidence of conflict-specific "collaboration" between the neural and cardiac-sympathetic signals. In states of high conflict, the alignment (i.e., product) of alpha dynamics and contractility were associated with a further widening of the boundary, independent of either signal's singular association. Cross-trial coherence analyses provided additional evidence that the autonomic systems controlling cardiac-sympathetics might influence the assessment of information streams during conflict by disrupting or overriding reward processing. We conclude that cardiac-sympathetic control might play a critical role, in collaboration with cognitive processes, during the approach-avoidance conflict in humans.

Abnormal neuronal morphological features, such as dendrite branching, axonal branching, and spine density, are thought to contribute to the symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, the role and molecular mechanisms of aberrant neuronal morphology in the regulation of mood disorders remain poorly characterized. Here, we show that neuritin, an activity-dependent protein, regulates the axonal morphology of serotonin neurons. Male neuritin knock-out (KO) mice harbored impaired axonal branches of serotonin neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex and basolateral region of the amygdala (BLA), and male neuritin KO mice exhibited depressive and anxiety-like behaviors. We also observed that the expression of neuritin was decreased by unpredictable chronic stress in the male mouse brain and that decreased expression of neuritin was associated with reduced axonal branching of serotonin neurons in the brain and with depressive and anxiety behaviors in mice. Furthermore, the stress-mediated impairments in axonal branching and depressive behaviors were reversed by the overexpression of neuritin in the BLA. The ability of neuritin to increase axonal branching in serotonin neurons involves fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signaling, and neuritin contributes to FGF-2-mediated axonal branching regulation in vitro. Finally, the oral administration of an FGF inhibitor reduced the axonal branching of serotonin neurons in the brain and caused depressive and anxiety behaviors in male mice. Our results support the involvement of neuritin in models of stress-induced depression and suggest that neuronal morphological plasticity may play a role in controlling animal behavior.

When faced with danger, human beings respond with a repertoire of defensive behaviors, including freezing and active avoidance. Previous research has revealed a pattern of physiological responses, characterized by heart rate bradycardia, reduced visual exploration, and heightened sympathetic arousal in reaction to avoidable threats, suggesting a state of attentive immobility in humans. However, the electrocortical underpinnings of these behaviors remain largely unexplored. To investigate the visuocortical components of attentive immobility, we recorded parieto-occipital alpha activity, along with eye movements and autonomic responses, while participants awaited either an avoidable, inevitable, or no threat. To test the robustness and generalizability of our findings, we collected data from a total of 101 participants (76 females, 25 males) at two laboratories. Across sites, we observed an enhanced suppression of parieto-occipital alpha activity during avoidable threats, in contrast to inevitable or no threat trials, particularly toward the end of the trial that prompted avoidance responses. This response pattern coincided with heart rate bradycardia, centralization of gaze, and increased sympathetic arousal. Furthermore, our findings expand on previous research by revealing that the amount of alpha suppression, along with centralization of gaze, and heart rate changes predict the speed of motor responses. Collectively, these findings indicate that when individuals encounter avoidable threats, they enter a state of attentive immobility, which enhances perceptual processing and facilitates action preparation. This state appears to reflect freezing-like behavior in humans.

The visual world is richly adorned with texture, which can serve to delineate important elements of natural scenes. In anesthetized macaque monkeys, selectivity for the statistical features of natural texture is weak in V1, but substantial in V2, suggesting that neuronal activity in V2 might directly support texture perception. To test this, we investigated the relation between single cell activity in macaque V1 and V2 and simultaneously measured behavioral judgments of texture. We generated stimuli along a continuum between naturalistic texture and phase-randomized noise and trained two macaque monkeys to judge whether a sample texture more closely resembled one or the other extreme. Analysis of responses revealed that individual V1 and V2 neurons carried much less information about texture naturalness than behavioral reports. However, the sensitivity of V2 neurons, especially those preferring naturalistic textures, was significantly closer to that of behavior compared with V1. The firing of both V1 and V2 neurons predicted perceptual choices in response to repeated presentations of the same ambiguous stimulus in one monkey, despite low individual neural sensitivity. However, neither population predicted choice in the second monkey. We conclude that neural responses supporting texture perception likely continue to develop downstream of V2. Further, combined with neural data recorded while the same two monkeys performed an orientation discrimination task, our results demonstrate that choice-correlated neural activity in early sensory cortex is unstable across observers and tasks, untethered from neuronal sensitivity, and therefore unlikely to directly reflect the formation of perceptual decisions.