Neuroscience

Skull Bone Marrow Drainage and Its Associations with Inflammation, Sleep Quality, and Cognitive Performance

1. Ying Zhou
2. Haidi Jin
3. Xiao Zhu
4. Yifei Li
5. Ziyu Zhou
6. Xin Huang
7. Huihong Ke
8. Mengmeng Fang
9. Jianzhong Sun
10. Min Lou

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This is a well-executed intrathecal MRI tracer study that provides valuable early in vivo evidence for CSF drainage into human skull bone marrow and explores clinically relevant associations using robust imaging methodology and regional analyses. However, the evidence supporting the interpretation of early (4 h) tracer signal as impaired clearance is incomplete, and appears difficult to reconcile with established CSF tracer kinetics. They also note that the reported links to sleep and cognitive performance are weakened by reliance on subjective, retrospective questionnaires rather than objective physiological measurements.

Reviewed by eLife

Detecting Regime Shifts: Neurocomputational Substrates for Over- and Underreactions to Change

1. Mu-Chen Wang
2. George Wu
3. Shih-Wei Wu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study offers valuable insights into how humans detect and adapt to regime shifts, highlighting dissociable contributions of the frontoparietal network and ventromedial prefrontal cortex to sensitivity to signal diagnosticity and transition probabilities. The combination of an innovative instructed-probability task, Bayesian behavioural modeling, and model-based fMRI analyses provides a solid foundation for the main claims; however, major interpretational limitations remain, particularly a potential confound between posterior switch probability and time in the neuroimaging results. At the behavioural level, reliance on explicitly instructed conditional probabilities leaves open alternative explanations that complicate attribution to a single computational mechanism, such that clearer disambiguation between competing accounts and stronger control of temporal and representational confounds would further strengthen the evidence.

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

The UAP56 mRNA Export Factor is Required for Dendrite and Synapse Pruning via Actin Regulation in Drosophila

1. Samuel Matthew Frommeyer
2. Ulrike Gigengack
3. Sandra Rode
4. Matthew Davies
5. Sebastian Rumpf

Reviewed by Review Commons

AutoMorphoTrack: A modular framework for quantitative analysis of organelle morphology, motility, and interactions at single-cell resolution

1. Armin Bayati
2. Jackson G. Schumacher
3. Xiqun Chen

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work describes a useful computational tool for automated morphometry of dynamic organelles from microscope images. However, the supporting evidence and novelty of the manuscript as presented are incomplete and could be improved. The work will be of interest to microscopists and bioimage analysts who are non-experts but wish to improve quantitative analysis of cellular structures.

Reviewed by eLife

Complex environmental cycles reveal evolution of circadian activity waveform and thermosensitive timeless splicing

1. Pragya Niraj Sharma
2. Vasu Sheeba

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study examines how mismatched light and temperature cycles shape Drosophila locomotor timing and temperature-dependent timeless splicing, and leverages long-term early/late selection lines to probe evolutionary plasticity. The strength of evidence is incomplete at present, mainly because startle/masking under step cues could confound the behavioural readouts, and tim's involvement remains correlative. The authors should address masking in the behaviour analyses and provide causal support for tim's role.

Reviewed by eLife

Multiple event segmentation mechanisms in the human brain

1. Tan T Nguyen
2. Joset A Etzel
3. Matthew A Bezdek
4. Jeffrey M Zacks

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study tests whether prediction error or prediction uncertainty controls how the brain segments continuous experience into events. The paper uses validated models that predict human behavior to analyze multivariate neural pattern changes during naturalistic movie watching. The authors provide solid evidence that there are overlapping but partially distinct brain dynamics for each signal.

Reviewed by eLife

Rank- and Threat-Dependent Social Modulation of Innate Defensive Behaviors

1. Ling-yun Li
2. Xinjian Gao
3. Ya-tang Li

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The authors investigate how dominance hierarchy shapes defensive strategies in mice under two naturalistic threats: a transient visual looming stimulus and a sustained live rat. This study provides important insights into how social context and dominance hierarchy modulate innate defensive behaviors across distinct naturalistic threats. The strength of evidence is convincing, with detailed classification and analysis of behaviors.

Reviewed by eLife

Decoding state specific connectivity during speech production and perception

1. Yasamin Esmaeili
2. Amirhossein Khalilian-Gourtani
3. Orrin Devinsky
4. Werner K Doyle
5. Patricia Dugan
6. Daniel Friedman
7. Adeen Flinker

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work represents a valuable finding of how single-trial functional connectivity may be used to infer different cognitive states involved in speech perception and production. Although the data and analyses are overall convincing, the theoretical advance and novelty of the finding are less clear. With a clearer idea of the functional significance of the connectivity data, the paper would be of interest to those interested in brain networks and communication.

Reviewed by eLife

Dissociable dynamic effects of expectation during statistical learning

1. Hannah H McDermott
2. Federico De Martino
3. Caspar M Schwiedrzik
4. Ryszard Auksztulewicz

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study is of relevance for the fields of predictive processing, perception and learning, with a well-designed paradigm allowing the authors to avoid several common confounds in investigating predictions, such as adaptation. Using a state-of-the-art multivariate EEG approach, the authors test the opposing process theory and find evidence in support of it. Overall, the empirical evidence is solid, however, some conclusions rest on limited evidence and need further work to reconcile the present results with previous studies.

Reviewed by eLife