Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable finding relating to how the state of arousal is represented within the superior colliculus, a principal visuo-oculomotor structure. The main conclusion that the representation of arousal is segregated, and thus influences visual activity but not motor output, is incompletely supported by the evidence, but could be stronger if a specific concern relating to an alternative explanation for the dichotomy was addressed. The work will be of interest to sensory, motor, and cognitive neuroscientists.

eLife Assessment

This important research addresses the effects of subjective control and task difficulty on experienced stress using a novel behavioral task administered on the same day in two large online samples. Convincing evidence is provided, establishing the internal and external task validity of the task, as well as a relationship between the sense of control and task difficulty, with individual differences in relevant mental health constructs. Evidence for the specificity of the link between control and stress would be more substantial if the design had not conflated control and reward rate. This work will be of interest to psychologists and clinicians studying the concepts of controllability, stress, and psychopathology.

eLife Assessment

This work provides a valuable comparison of sentence structure representations in the human brain and state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Based on solid analysis of 7T fMRI data, it systematically identifies sentences in which LLMs underperform relative to models that explicitly code for syntactic structure. The study will be of significant interest to both cognitive neuroscientists and artificial intelligence researchers.

eLife Assessment

This set of experiments provides a valuable finding regarding the need for prior inhibitory training to recruit the infralimbic cortex in extinction learning. The multiple clever behavioral designs supply converging lines of evidence in a compelling manner, but several issues, such as the group sizes and appropriate analysis of data, render the overall strength of support incomplete. With these issues resolved, this manuscript will be of interest to behavioral neuroscientists, especially those interested in learning & memory and/or cortical function.

eLife Assessment

This important study presents convincing findings on creating an exhaustive library of new enhancer-AAVs targeting astrocytes and oligodendrocytes with high potential for both basic and translational work, which will be of value to a large and growing community. However, the outdated description of glial biology in the Introduction, the overstated claims of utility in the Conclusion, and the loose stringency in the criteria used to assemble the library diminish the strengths of the claims. The work will be of interest to neuroscientists working on glial cell biology.

eLife Assessment

This paper presents a collection of analyses relating structure and function in the whole-brain Drosophila EM connectome and whole-brain calcium imaging data. The linkage of detailed anatomical structure with population activity is of broad interest in circuit neuroscience in light of increasingly detailed brain maps, but the analysis methods used made the evidence incomplete. The conclusions are useful for specific network observations, but a more thorough analysis of the anatomical and functional data is needed to support the overall claims.

eLife Assessment

This work describes a highly complex automated algorithm for analyzing vascular imaging data from two-photon microscopy. This tool has the potential to be extremely valuable to the field and to fill gaps in knowledge of hemodynamic activity across a regional network. The solid biological application provides a demonstration of their pipeline's capabilities and suggests intriguing hypotheses around prolonged vascular tone changes, but will need to be followed up by further experiments to be conclusively demonstrated.

eLife Assessment

This revised manuscript presents an important characterization of mouse auditory cortex receptive field organization, utilizing two-photon imaging of specific subpopulations. They demonstrate a degradation of tonotopic organization from the input to the output neurons. The strength of the evidence is convincing.

eLife Assessment

Endothelial cell-specific loss of TGF-beta signaling in mice leads to CNS vascular defects, specifically impairing retinal development and promoting immune cell infiltration. The data are solid, showing that loss of TGF-beta signaling triggers vascular inflammation and attracts immune cells specific to CNS vasculature. These findings are important, highlighting TGF-beta's role in maintaining vascular-immune homeostasis and its therapeutic potential in neurovascular inflammatory diseases.

eLife Assessment

This important study characterizes and validates a new activity marker - fast labelling of engram neurons (FLEN) - which is transiently active and driven by cFos, allowing the monitoring of intrinsic and synaptic properties of engram neurons shortly after the learning experience. The results convincingly demonstrate the utility of this novel viral tool for studying early changes in the properties of engram cells. FLEN will provide a beneficial tool for the neuroscience community once it is made available at a plasmid repository.