Eye Movements Contribute to Foveal Crowding
Ashley Michelle Clark, Aaron Huynh, and Martina Poletti
(see article e0594242024)
When there are many objects in our surrounding environment, the crowding of visual stimuli can hinder our ability to recognize and discriminate between objects. Researchers have long investigated the neural underpinnings of this. However, most previous work has focused on how visual crowding affects peripheral vision, not foveal vision, and the influence of fixational eye movements on foveal crowding has never been examined. Clark and colleagues addressed these oversights in their study. In a sample of 13 people, the authors observed that foveal vision was impacted by crowding and that, unlike peripheral vision, fixational eye movements played a role in the effects they observed by introducing spatial uncertainty and worsening crowding effects on vision. This is likely due to the fact that foveal crowding neural pooling regions have the smallest receptive fields, which over time get stimulated both by the target and nearby distractors as a result of fixational eye motion. These findings extend our understanding of visual crowding and thus advance the field.
Shown are representative images of a mouse primary neuron culture highlighting mTau8 (green) and transferrin (red) and overlaid with bright-field images. The top image is 1 h after mTau8 treatment, and the bottom image is 3 d later. See Jang et al. for more information.
Inhibiting the Spread of Tau Pathology with mTau8
Elliot Jang, Kevt’her Hoxha, Damian Mozier, Abigail Insana, Ethan Farber, et al.
(see article e0877242024)
Neurodegenerative diseases are characterized, in part, by the progressive spread of tau across the brain. Preclinical studies in mice suggest that tau antibodies can mitigate tau spread, which has informed the use of immunotherapy agents in clinical trials. While previous research suggests that tau antibodies inhibit pathogenic tau seed internalization into cells or block tau seed elongation after they are internalized, more insight into their mechanism is needed. Herein, Jang and colleagues advanced our understanding of how tau antibodies inhibit the spread of tau pathology by assessing the mechanism of action behind a mouse tau-specific antibody (mTau8). Using primary neurons and female wild-type mice seeded with tau seeds derived from Alzheimer's disease patients, they discovered that mTau8 binds to endogenous tau inside neurons and inhibits the elongation of tau seeds. This finding is informative for developing antibody-based therapies to treat tau pathology in neurodegenerative diseases.
Footnotes
This Week in The Journal was written by Paige McKeon
