This review presents state-of-the-art knowledge about the roles of the basal ganglia (BG) in action-selection, cognition, and motivation, and how this knowledge has been used to improve deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Such pathological conditions include Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Tourette syndrome, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The first section presents evidence supporting current hypotheses of how the cortico-BG circuitry works to select motor and emotional actions, and how defects in this circuitry can cause symptoms of the BG diseases. Emphasis is given to the role of striatal dopamine on motor performance, motivated behaviors and learning of procedural memories. Next, the use of cutting-edge electrochemical techniques in animal and human studies of BC functioning under normal and disease conditions is discussed. Finally, functional neuroimaging studies are reviewed; these works have shown the relationship between cortico-BG structures activated during DBS and improvement of disease symptoms. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Instructions are known to have a profound impact on human behavior. Nevertheless, research on the effects of instructions is relatively scarce and scattered across different areas of research in psychology and neuroscience. The current issue of this journal contains six papers that review research on instructions in different research areas. In this introduction to the special section, we provide the outline of a framework that focuses on five components that can be varied in research on this topic (sender, message, receiver, context, and outcome). The framework brings order to the boundless potential variability in research on the effects of messages (i.e., it has heuristic value) and highlights that past research explored only a tiny fraction of what is possible (i.e., it has predictive value). Moreover, it reveals that research in different areas tends to examine different instantiations of the five components. The latter observation implies that much can be gained from closer interactions between researchers from different areas.

Two core questions in the study of speech evolution are whether nonhuman primate signals should be conceived as referential, and what the role of social cognition is in primate communication. Current evidence suggests that the structure of primate vocalizations is largely innate and related to the affective/motivational state of the caller, with a probabilistic and underdetermined relationship between specific events and calls. Moreover, nonhuman primates do not appear to express or comprehend communicative or informative intent, which is in line with a lack of mental state attribution to others. We argue that nonhuman primate vocalizations as well as gestures should be best conceived as goal-directed, where signallers are sensitive to the relation between their signalling and receivers' responses. Receivers in turn use signals to predict signaller behaviour. In combination with their ability to integrate information from multiple sources, this renders the system as a whole relatively powerful, despite the lack of higher-order intentionality on the side of sender or receiver. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Alcohol exposure and stressful events in life can induce long-lasting changes in physiology, behavior and gene expression patterns, eventually facilitating the development of psychiatric diseases like alcohol use disorders (AUD). Epigenetic mechanisms have been recently proposed to play a role in the cellular actions of alcohol via chromatin remodeling. Here we discuss interactions between stress and the pharmacological effects of alcohol, including the possibility that early exposure to, or withdrawal of, alcohol might induce stressful effects of their own. A specific aim is to describe novel molecular mechanisms by which stress, alcohol or their combined presentation impact on the epigenome. A key question is why only a fraction of the population progresses from regular, non-problematic, alcohol use to AUD, despite suffering from similar alcohol exposure. It is important to analyze how environmental factors, most notably stress, interact with the epigenetic machinery to increase vulnerability for AUD. The knowledge derived from this endeavor will be critical for the development of preventive strategies and new, drug- or gene-based, therapies.

Individuals with Down syndrome present many clinical characteristics, such as metabolic, endocrine, anatomic and neurologic dysfunctions, that contribute to the physiopathology of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS). As a result, sleep apnea prevalence is significantly greater in population with Down syndrome, and may have critical consequences on health and quality of life, such as cardiovascular risks and obesity. This paper compiles a list of specific risk factors of OSAS present in Down syndrome to explain the high prevalence of this sleep disorder. Endocrine, metabolic, and morphologic aspects are discussed, as well as cardiac, autonomic, genetic and lifestyle factors. Thus, the purpose of this review is to present risk factors, consequences and management of OSAS in the population with Down syndrome.

The difficulty adults find in drawing objects or scenes from real life is puzzling, assuming that there are few gross individual differences in the phenomenology of visual scenes and in fine motor control in the neurologically healthy population. A review of research concerning the perceptual, motoric and memorial correlates of drawing ability was conducted in order to understand why most adults err when trying to produce faithful representations of objects and scenes. The findings reveal that accurate perception of the subject and of the drawing is at the heart of drawing proficiency, although not to the extent that drawing skill elicits fundamental changes in visual perception. Instead, the decisive role of representational decisions reveals the importance Of appropriate segmentation of the visual scene and of the influence of pictorial schemas. This leads to the conclusion that domain-specific, flexible, top-down control of visual attention plays a critical role in development of skill in visual art and may also be a window into creative thinking. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.