Past events

Scientific publishing is a natural part of the research endeavor as it marks the end of one project and the start of another. Even so, the actual publication process spanning from manuscript submission, initial editorial evaluation, peer-review and the journal’s decision to publish a given manuscript may appear mysterious from the author’s perspective. In high profile, high impact journals where the published manuscripts are given exposure to the widest audience possible, the manuscript selection process can be especially arduous and competitive at times. This presentation will discuss the general issues and framework of publishing in high profile scientific journals, and will explain the editorial process and manuscript selection in Nature Neuroscience. Also included in the discussion are suggestions for efficient writing of scientific manuscripts and rebuttal letters, potential utility of presubmission inquiry, and transference of manuscripts and reviews from one journal to another in Nature Publishing Group’s portfolio and beyond.

The talk will provide an overview of recent developments in major depression, with emphasis on problem of predicting the clinical effects of the new antidepressants. I will discuss research findings both at the clinical level and at the levels of the biology of antidepressant action and of neuromodulation.

Recalling unrelated memory items is a challenging task for most people. In the classical free recall paradigm, participants are asked to repeat a list of randomly assembled words in an arbitrary order. For lists as short as five words, people begin to make recall mistakes, and for longer lists the fraction of recalled words is steadily decreasing. The variability of recall performance across participants is very large, but its origins, and in particular the potential contribution of practice, are not clear. In this study, we explored whether more and less successful participants exhibit different patterns of recall and whether this pattern changes over the course of the experiment. To this end, we analyzed a large data set of immediate free recall collected in the lab of M. Kahana (UPenn). We found that some participants exhibited extremely high recall performance, including many trials where they recalled completely the full presented lists of 16 words (‘perfect trials’). Moreover, these trials were typically characterized by a robust application of input-position dependent recall strategies; most prominently a serial ordering or a number of chunking strategies where presented lists were recalled in groups of consecutively positioned words. The number of perfect trials increased dramatically with practice, accompanied by a general increase in the extent of positional grouping applied by participants; however the choice of a particular strategy and the time course of its acquisition were highly variable among participants. Our results show, for the first time, that practicing memory recall results in improved performance, and that there are multiple ways humans can adopt to achieve perfect recall.