Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This useful study examines whether microsaccade direction primarily indexes shifts rather than the maintenance of covert spatial attention, offering a potentially informative account of inconsistencies in the prior literature. However, the evidence remains incomplete because the key effects are based on relatively sparse microsaccadic events, while concerns about event detection, fixation control, subject-level robustness, and the interpretation of gaze-density analyses remain unresolved. The correlational design and absence of a neutral condition or independent measure of attentional shifting further limit the central claim. The work will be of interest to researchers studying attention, eye movements, and visuomotor mechanisms.

eLife Assessment

This important study extends a model of cortical normalization (ORGaNICs) to interacting cortical areas and shows that communication through coherence and communication subspaces can arise from a single set of dynamics. The evidence is solid, showing analytically that contrast-dependent gamma dynamics and a low-dimensional inter-areal communication subspace arise from one parameter set, though the comparisons to data remain qualitative and the analytics rest on a linearization that is not checked against numerical simulation. The work will interest neuroscientists and theorists concerned with inter-areal communication, cortical oscillations, and divisive normalization.

eLife Assessment

This work presents a software and hardware suite for targeted photostimulation that can be used in vivo. The package is a well-designed and documented hardware/software suite with a comprehensive build guide. This tool will likely promote important neuroscience advances through targeted real-time perturbation of the cerebral cortex. Overall, this manuscript makes a compelling case on how to design and make available power tools for the research community.