next asked whether the human glial chimeras might have cognitive advantages over their unengrafted or mouse GPC-allografted counterparts. We found that the human glial chimeras indeed performed better than control mice across a variety of learning tasks, that included auditory fear conditioning, novel object and place recognition, and Barnes maze navigation (Figure 3). In all of these tests - but not in any test of social interactivity or primary perception - the human glial chimeras performed better and acquired new causal associations more quickly than did murine-allografted or untransplanted controls (Han et al. 2013). In short, they learned more rapidly, and at least along the axes of the tests performed, could be defined - if colloquially so - as smarter. As such, these glial chimeras may provide us a viable - if provocative - model by which to evaluate the species-specific contributions of human glia to human cognition.
