, 2011) or a more generalizable dissociation between attention and memory. In summary, the findings of Guerin and colleagues provide a compelling characterization of how distinct aspects of lateral parietal cortex contribute to situations in which we must carefully compare the present with the past. These findings are relevant to a very active debate concerning the role of lateral parietal cortex in memory (for reviews, see Cabeza et al., 2008; Shimamura, 2011; Wagner et al., 2005).

Additionally, the study makes an VX 770 important contribution to our understanding of memory failures (Johnson, 1997; Schacter, 1999), highlighting both the situations in which false memories are likely to occur and the neural responses that are associated with these lapses. An interesting question for future work is how necessary the contributions of lateral parietal cortex are to successful episodic remembering. While damage to lateral parietal cortex has not been associated with robust memory deficits—clearly not to the degree that occurs with damage to the medial temporal lobe system—it is possible that lateral parietal regions make subtle but meaningful contributions to memory. This could be addressed by carefully probing memory functioning in neglect patients with parietal damage. For example, in the paradigm employed by Guerin et al. (2012), perhaps damage to IPS

would impair SKI-606 cost the initial step of allocating attention to candidate pictures. Damage to IPL, on the other hand, may result in a diminished ability to make subtle discriminations between targets and related (but new) items. Both neuroimaging and patient work can further characterize the competitive interactions between IPL and IPS in tasks that carefully and cleverly separate attentional demands and memory success as Gueirin and colleagues have done. “
“Scientists around the world are wondering how changes in regulations governing animal research will influence progress in neuroscience. How, for example, would active promotion of the 3Rs, as required in the not new European Directive (European Commission, 2010) and the most recent edition of the Guide for

the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals—“the Guide”—(National Research Council, 2011) impact innovative research in neuroscience if applied globally? The principles of the 3Rs—replacement, reduction, and refinement—were first articulated over 50 years ago by W.M.S. Russell and R.L. Burch (Russell and Burch, 1959). Replacement refers to methods that avoid the use of animals either absolutely (e.g., using computer modeling or human volunteers) or relatively (e.g., using invertebrates such as Drosophila and nematodes, or cultured cell lines derived from animals). Reduction occurs when researchers obtain comparable levels of information from fewer animals, often through improved experimental design and technique or statistical analysis.