Neuroscience

Reorganization of spinal neural connectivity following recovery after thoracic spinal cord injury: insights from computational modelling

1. Natalia A Shevtsova
2. Andrew B Lockhart
3. Ilya A Rybak
4. David SK Magnuson
5. Simon M Danner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study describes a computational model of the rat spinal locomotor circuits and how they could be plastically reconfigured after lateral hemisection or contusion injuries to replicate gaits observed experimentally in vivo. Overall, the simulation results convincingly mirror the gait parameters observed experimentally. The model suggests the emergence of detour circuits after lateral hemisection, whereas after a midline contusion, the model suggests plasticity of left-right and sensory inputs below the injury.

Reviewed by eLife

Power Pixels: a turnkey pipeline for processing of Neuropixel recordings

1. Guido T. Meijer
2. Francesco P. Battaglia

Reviewed by Peer Community in Neuroscience

Alcohol Attenuates CRF-Induced Excitatory Effects from the Extended Amygdala to Dorsostriatal Cholinergic Interneurons

1. Amanda Essoh
2. Himanshu Gangal
3. Zhenbo Huang
4. Ruifeng Chen
5. Xueyi Xie
6. Xuehua Wang
7. Valerie Vierkant
8. Miguel Garza
9. Lierni Ugartemendia
10. Maria E Secci
11. Nicholas W Gilpin
12. Nicholas J Justice
13. Robert O Messing
14. Jun Wang

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important work shows that corticotrophin-releasing factor is delivered monosynaptically to dorsal striatal cholinergic interneurons from the central amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. CRF increases cholinergic interneuron firing and release of acetylcholine, and this action is attenuated by pre-exposure to ethanol, suggesting a potential role in stress- and alcohol use disorders. This revision addressed prior concerns, presented convincing evidence supporting the conclusions, and set the stage for additional important studies.

Reviewed by eLife

Toward Robust Neuroanatomical Normative Models: Influence of Sample Size and Covariates Distributions

1. Camille Elleaume
2. Bruno Hebling Vieira
3. Dorothea L Floris
4. Nicolas Langer
5. the Australian Imaging Biomarkers and Lifestyle flagship study of ageing

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important manuscript evaluates how sample size and demographic balance of reference cohorts affect the reliability of normative models. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing. This work will be of interest to clinicians and scientists working with normative models.

Reviewed by eLife

Spatially Periodic Computation in the Entorhinal-Hippocampal Circuit During Navigation

1. Bo Zhang
2. Xin Guan
3. Dean Mobbs
4. Jia Liu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study offers important insights into how entorhinal and hippocampal activity support human thinking in feature spaces. It replicates hexagonal symmetry in entorhinal cortex, reports a novel three-fold symmetry in both behavior and hippocampal signals, and links these findings with a computational model. The task and analyses are sophisticated, and the results appear convincing and of broad interest to neuroscientists.

Reviewed by eLife

Dynamics of mesoscale brain network during visual discrimination learning revealed by chronic, large-scale single-unit recording

1. Tian-Yi Wang
2. Chengcong Feng
3. Chengyao Wang
4. Chi Ren
5. Zhengtuo Zhao

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents experiments suggesting intriguing mesoscale reorganization of functional connectivity across distributed cortical and subcortical circuits during learning. The approach is technically impressive and the results are potentially of valuable significance. The authors have also made clear effort to address concerns in revision. However, the strength of evidence remains incomplete. Acquisition of data from additional animals in the primary experiment could bolster these findings.

Reviewed by eLife

Synaptic Encoding of Time in Working Memory

1. Gianluigi Mongillo
2. Misha Tsodyks

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper develops a fundamental theory that explains how the brain can hold in working memory not only the identity but also the order of presented stimuli. Previous theories did not explain the ability of people to immediately recall the correct order of the stimulus presentation. The authors present compelling evidence that this can be achieved through synaptic augmentation, an experimentally observed phenomenon with a time scale of tens of seconds.

Reviewed by eLife

Spontaneous fluctuations in global connectivity reflect transitions between states of high and low prediction error

1. Paul C Bogdan
2. Shenyang Huang
3. Lifu Deng
4. Simon W Davis
5. Roberto Cabeza

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study uses a valuable combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography (EEG) to study brain activity related to prediction errors in relation to both sensorimotor and more complex cognitive functions. It provides incomplete evidence to suggest that prediction error minimisation drives brain activity across both types of processing and that elevated inter-regional functional coupling along a superior-inferior axis is associated with high prediction error, whereas coupling along a posterior-anterior axis is associated with low prediction error. The manuscript will be of interest to neuroscientists working on predictive coding and decision-making, but would benefit from more precise localisation of EEG sources and more rigorous statistical controls.

Reviewed by eLife

Multi-talker speech comprehension at different temporal scales in listeners with normal and impaired hearing

1. Jixing Li
2. Qixuan Wang
3. Qian Zhou
4. Lu Yang
5. Yutong Shen
6. Shujian Huang
7. Shaonan Wang
8. Liina Pylkkänen
9. Zhiwu Huang

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study a computational language model, i.e., HM-LSTM, to quantify the neural encoding of hierarchical linguistic information in speech, and addresses how hearing impairment affects neural encoding of speech. Overall the evidence for the findings is solid, although the evidence for different speech processing stages could be strengthened by a more rigorous temporal response function (TRF) analysis. The study is of potential interest to audiologists and researchers who are interested in the neural encoding of speech.

Reviewed by eLife

Domain-adaptive matching bridges synthetic and in vivo neural dynamics for neural circuit connectivity inference

1. Kaiwen Sheng
2. Shanghang Zhang
3. Shenjian Zhang
4. Yutao He
5. Maxime Beau
6. Peng Qu
7. Xiaofei Liu
8. Youhui Zhang
9. Lei Ma
10. Kai Du

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This article reports an algorithm for inferring the presence of synaptic connection between neurons based on naturally occurring spiking activity of a neuronal network. One key improvement is to combine self-supervised and synthetic approaches to learn to focus on features that generalize to the conditions of the observed network. This valuable contribution is currently supported by incomplete evidence.

Reviewed by eLife