Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This important study details changes in the brain functional connectivity in a longitudinal cohort of Gambian children assessed outside a lab setup with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) from age 5 to 24 months, in relation to early physical growth and cognitive flexibility capacities at preschool age. Evidence supporting conclusions on the evolution of brain connectivity is convincing and highlights a different trajectory compared with populations from high-income countries. However, analyses linking connectivity trajectories with early adverse conditions such as undernutrition and later cognitive development are only partially supported due to insufficient longitudinal data and statistical power. This study will be of significant interest to neuroscientists, psychologists and neuroimaging researchers working on infant development in relation to environmental factors.

eLife Assessment

This study addresses an important question in gustatory neuroscience by developing a machine-learning classifier to identify distinct ingestive orofacial movement subtypes from electromyographic recordings and relating their dynamics to population-level activity in the gustatory cortex. The evidence that transitions in cortical ensemble firing are temporally associated with reorganization of ingestive movement patterns is convincing, though some aspects of the behavioral classification and neural analyses require further validation and clarification. The work provides a technically innovative framework for linking neural state dynamics to the motor expression of taste-guided decisions.

eLife Assessment

This study presents valuable computational findings on the neural basis of learning new motor memories and the savings using recurrent neural networks. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, but it would benefit from more detailed discussion on the specific conditions under which savings emerges from purely implicit mechanisms. This work will be of interest to computational and experimental neuroscientists working in motor learning.