Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This paper addresses a valuable research question on the modest heritability of the brain's response to movie watching, and how heritability varies under different parameters such as regional spatial hyperalignment and BOLD frequency bands. The topic of this paper is of interest to fMRI methodological experts, and potentially to a broader cognitive neuroscience audience, and those with an interest in understanding the heritable sources of individual differences in brain function. Although some of the conclusions could be strengthened by future cross validation studies in independent and larger family-based samples, and through complementary twin/family and SNP-based models, taken altogether, the analyses and results provide convincing evidence for the overall conclusions.

eLife Assessment

This paper reports the findings of a neuroimaging experiment that tested the hypothesis that the cortex, specifically early visual areas, reinstates certain content from past episodic events. This is a useful study that highlights the role of early sensory cortices in supporting rapid, one-shot learning of location information for long-term memory. The strength of the evidence is solid, with the methods, data, and analyses broadly supporting the claims.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable and well-documented computational pipeline for the scalable analysis and spike sorting of large extracellular electrophysiology datasets, with particular relevance for high-density recordings such as Neuropixels. The authors demonstrate the pipeline's utility for benchmarking spike sorter performance and evaluating the effects of data compression, supported by thorough testing, clear figures, and openly available code. The workflow is reproducible, portable, and practical, providing concrete guidance on computational cost and runtime. Overall, the evidence supporting the pipeline's performance and output quality is compelling, and this work will be of broad interest to the systems neuroscience community.

eLife Assessment

This important study shows that long-range somatostatin-expressing neurons in the ventrolateral periaqueductal grey that project to the rostral ventromedial medulla selectively suppress pain responses during conditioned fear. The evidence supporting these conclusions is exceptional, with methods spanning a novel cued fear-conditioned analgesia paradigm, cell-type-specific optogenetic activation and inhibition, anatomical circuit tracing, and in vivo spinal cord electrophysiology. These results will be of broad interest to systems and behavioral neuroscientists studying fear, pain, and descending pain-control circuitry.

eLife Assessment

This study provides fundamental insights into the mechanisms of visual object categorization in primates through a scalable behavioral framework for assessing category learning and generalization in macaque monkeys. The evidence is compelling, based on extensive behavioral characterization, rigorous control experiments, and comprehensive comparisons with humans and computational models, although extending the model analyses to the secondary monkey experiments would further strengthen the conclusions.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a platform to implement closed-loop experiments in mice based on auditory feedback. The authors provide convincing evidence that their platform enables a variety of closed-loop experiments using neural or movement signals, indicating that it will be a valuable resource to the neuroscience community. The authors make this platform more accessible by complementing the paper with a detailed tutorial explaining how to implement the software and hardware.

eLife Assessment

The article presents important findings of a dissociation between phasic and tonic pain functions in adaptive behavior, combining immersive VR, computational modeling, skin conductance, and EEG data. The methodology used is convincing. Its ecological design and sophisticated computational modeling are major strengths.

eLife Assessment

The authors show that innate defensive behavior in mice is shaped by threat intensity, reward value, and social hierarchy, highlighting how value and social context influence instinctive decisions. The authors provide a valuable characterization of escape behavior which approximates naturalistic conditions. Despite minor methodological limitations, the work provides a solid foundation for future investigation of how reward and social context interact to influence behavior.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study draws on large-scale multimodal MRI measurements of human brain structure across the lifespan to offer a new perspective on visual cortex architecture. The data provide compelling evidence for two cortical architectural gradients that show distinct functional, cytoarchitectural, behavioural, and lifespan profiles. One gradient captures a broad early-to-higher-level visual cortical hierarchy in which cortical thickness tissue density covary; the other reflects more localised divergence from this relationship, notably predicting putative anterior temporal visual field representations that have not previously been described.

eLife Assessment

This important study investigates frequency-dependent effects of transcutaneous tibial nerve stimulation (TTNS) on bladder function in healthy humans and, through a computational model, shows that low-frequency stimulation accelerates, and high-frequency delays, the urge to void. The integration of experimental and modeling approaches provides a solid proof-of concept foundation for clinical trials targeting urinary retention. However, concerns were raised about over-interpretation of modest effects and the limited physiological validity of the computational model, and the need for replication in clinical populations. Some conclusions, particularly in the abstract, could be further tempered to better align with the strength of the available evidence.