Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This well-designed study offers important insights into the development of infants' responses to music based on the exploration of EEG neural auditory responses and video-based movement analysis. The compelling results revealed that evoked responses emerge between 3 and 12 months of age, but no age group demonstrated evidence of coordinated movements to music. This study will be of significant interest to developmental psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as researchers interested in music processing and in the translation of perception into action.

eLife Assessment

This important cross-species study tests whether the corpus callosum contains parallel, segregated pathways for ipsilateral and contralateral visual-field information, rather than mixed inputs from the two hemispheres. A major strength is its use of a combination of high-field functional magnetic resonance inaging and Bayesian population receptive field (pRF) modelling in humans with viral tracing in mice to offer complementary evidence for pathway segregation. At present, the evidence supporting the authors' claims is incomplete and would benefit from ruling out potential confounds that could mimic tract segregation in the human white-matter pRF data and the mouse anatomical tracing results, and from sharpening claims about laminar specificity.

eLife Assessment

This is a useful study, bolstering our understanding of spatial reference frames of visual perception. The high-resolution data and sophisticated analyses confirm and enhance earlier findings that visual representations operate in a predominantly retinotopic reference frame throughout the visual hierarchy in the human cortex. However, these analyses are currently incomplete, leaving open the possibility that eye-position gain and or spatiotopic representations may also be present.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental study reports convincing evidence for early verbal episodic memory formation. The findings demonstrate that speaker identity is a crucial feature, enabling episodic-like memories from birth, and will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists working on brain development, memory, language learning and social cognition.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study presents a framework for a shareable data analysis pipeline aimed at improving reproducibility in neuroscience. The evidence for robustness and inter-laboratory operability is convincing. Overall, this work will be of interest to neuroscientists engaged in the analysis of large-scale neuronal recordings.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript presents a valuable study of the activity and functional relevance of different circuits in the dentate gyrus of mice performing a pattern separation task. Convincing evidence is presented to support the paper's central conclusions. The study is likely to be of interest to those studying the subregional organization and cell type-specific functions of the dentate gyrus.

eLife Assessment

The analysis of neural morphology across Heliconiini butterfly species revealed brain area-specific changes associated with new foraging behaviours. While the volume of the centre for learning and memory, the mushroom bodies, was known to vary widely across species, these new, valuable results show conservation of the volume of a center for navigation, the central complex, but with specific changes in neuropeptide expression in the noduli and in the numbers of ellipsoid body ring neurons. The presented evidence is convincing for both volumetric conservation in the central complex and fine neuroanatomical differences associated with pollen feeding, delivered by experimental approaches that are applicable to other insect species. This work will be of interest to evolutionary biologists, entomologists, and neuroscientists.

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.