This month’s featured researcher is Dr. Rebecca Spencer. Bekki is a Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, where she runs the Somneurolab, dedicated to studying the neuroscience of sleep. She recently authored a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled, “Contributions of memory and brain development to the bioregulation of naps and nap transitions in early childhood” in which she and her co-author, Tracy Riggins propose that nap transitions are more related to hippocampal development than age specifically. The story has received a lot of attention in the press, including the Boston Globe. You can read about it from the College of Natural Sciences.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online in October. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

1: Park J, Huber DE. A visual sense of number emerges from divisive normalization in a simple center-surround convolutional network. Elife. 2022 Oct 3;11:e80990. doi: 10.7554/eLife.80990. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36190191.

2: Cho E, Kim K, Kim H, Cho SR. Reelin protects against pathological ?-synuclein accumulation and dopaminergic neurodegeneration after environmental enrichment in Parkinson’s disease. Neurobiol Dis. 2022 Oct 18:105898. doi: 10.1016/j.nbd.2022.105898. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36270619.

3: Jiang Z, Sanders DMW, Cowell RA. Visual and semantic similarity norms for a photographic image stimulus set containing recognizable objects, animals and scenes. Behav Res Methods. 2022 Oct;54(5):2364-2380. doi: 10.3758/s13428-021-01732-0. Epub 2022 Jan 27. PMID: 35088365; PMCID: PMC9325926.

4: Finkel MA, Troller-Renfree SV, Meyer JS, Noble KG. Co-Rooming Accounts for Socioeconomic Disparities in Infant Sleep Quality among Families Living in Urban Environments. Children (Basel). 2022 Sep 21;9(10):1429. doi: 10.3390/children9101429. PMID: 36291365; PMCID: PMC9600685.

5: Wang L, Mirabella VR, Dai R, Su X, Xu R, Jadali A, Bernabucci M, Singh I, Chen Y, Tian J, Jiang P, Kwan KY, Pak C, Liu C, Comoletti D, Hart RP, Chen C, Südhof TC, Pang ZP. Analyses of the autism-associated neuroligin-3 R451C mutation in human neurons reveal a gain-of-function synaptic mechanism. Mol Psychiatry. 2022 Oct 24. doi: 10.1038/s41380-022-01834-x. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36280753.

6: Spencer RMC, Riggins T. Contributions of memory and brain development to the bioregulation of naps and nap transitions in early childhood. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Nov;119(44):e2123415119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2123415119. Epub 2022 Oct 24. PMID: 36279436.