Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This important study provides a comprehensive map of how touch-sensitive neurons in the fly head connect to downstream circuits, revealing parallel pathways that preserve spatial organization and identifying a developmentally defined circuit linking sensory input to grooming behavior. The evidence is convincing, with detailed anatomical reconstruction and quantitative analysis supporting the main claims, while the link to behaviour remains based on prior functional work. The study will be of interest to neuroscientists studying sensory processing and motor control, and provides an invaluable resource for future functional investigations.

eLife Assessment

This important study describes a novel Bayesian psychophysical approach that efficiently measures how well humans can discriminate between colors across the entire isoluminant plane. The evidence was considered compelling, as it included successful model validation against hold-out data and published datasets. This approach could prove to be of use to color vision scientists, as well as to those who employ computational psychophysics and attempt to model perceptual stimulus fields with smooth variations over coordinate spaces.

eLife Assessment

This important study investigates how the nervous system adapts to changes in the mechanics of the body, which are altered through a tendon transfer surgery affecting finger extensor and flexor muscles. By measuring task performance, joint kinematics, and muscle activity for several weeks post surgery, the authors provide convincing evidence that monkeys undergo a two-phase adaptation process. First, they adopt a maladaptive strategy to overcome the functional challenges imposed by the surgery, and then revert to a strategy that uses the same patterns of muscle coactivation observed pre-tendon transfer.

eLife Assessment

This useful study uses a chemoinformatics pipeline to identify a list of candidate mosquito repellants that may be pleasant to smell and safe for humans. The strength of evidence and in particular the computational methodology are incomplete because it is insufficiently benchmarked against other leading models. At the high concentrations tested, there may also be off-target effects of the repellents on the mosquitoes that are not considered.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript proposes a valuable idea on how cortical networks may learn a helpful representation of sensory stimuli. The model implementing this idea is tested in multiple experimental paradigms. However, the evidence remains incomplete as to whether the method supports both invariance and equivariance and whether it can estimate the dynamics of the moving object.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study presents a tool that uses brain anatomy to predict the layout and size of early visual maps, and it is strengthened by the use of a large and diverse collection of scans to examine differences across people and groups. The evidence is solid for the general usefulness of the approach, but incomplete for some of the broader claims about prediction accuracy and use across data sets, particularly for estimates of map size and for showing that the model improves on repeated functional measurements. This paper is likely to be of significant interest to visual perception researchers, especially those who use fMRI.

eLife Assessment

This study thoroughly assesses tactile acuity on women's breasts, for which no dependable data currently exists. The study provides two important contributions, by convincingly showing that tactile acuity on the breast is poor in comparison to other body parts, and that acuity is worst in larger breasts, indicating that the number of tactile sensors is fixed. This study will be of interest to the broader community of touch, as well as those interested in breast reconstruction and sexual function.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable finding relating to how the state of arousal is represented within the superior colliculus (SC), a principal visuo-oculomotor structure. The main conclusion that the SC's neural representation of arousal is segregated from motor related output appears to have solid support by the data. The work will be of interest to sensory, motor and cognitive neuroscientists.

eLife Assessment

This study explores how exogenous attention operates at the finest spatial scale of vision, within the foveola - a topic that has not been previously explored but is of interest to visual neuroscientists. The question is important for understanding how attention shapes perception, and how it differs between the periphery and the central regions of highest visual acuity. The evidence indicating that attention near the fovea preferentially enhances low spatial frequencies is compelling, as shown by carefully designed experiments with state-of-the-art eye tracking to monitor attended locations just a few tens of minutes of arc away from the fixation target.

eLife Assessment

This is an important and rigorous study that addresses the question of what determines the spatial organization of endocytic zones at synapses. The authors use compelling approaches, in both Drosophila and rodent model systems, to define the role of activity and active zone structure on the organization of the peri-active zone. While the findings are primarily negative, they are carefully executed and contribute to the field by refining existing models of presynaptic organization.