The role of ventral tegmental area GABA neurons in behavior is unclear. Here, authors show that VTA GABA but not dopamine neurons integrate positive and negative valence to encode motivational conflic...

To navigate dynamic environments, animals must rapidly integrate sensory information and respond appropriately to gather rewards and avoid threats. It is well established that dopamine (DA) neurons in...

When news broke of an explosion inside Harvard’s neurobiology building early Saturday morning, every scientist who works with monkeys felt it—an involuntary jolt, a spike of cortisol, the silent thought: what if it had been us? Neither animals nor people were hurt, thankfully. It doesn’t appear to have been an attack. But it didn’t matter. For those of us who work with monkeys, the fear is always near the surface.

Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...

Working memory improves during adolescent brain development. Zhu et al. tracked monkeys through adolescence, revealing that maturation of white matter tracts and refinement of neural firing patterns s...

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (BCI) leverage knowledge about neural representations to translate movement-related neural activity into actions. BCI implants have targeted broad cortical regi...