Neuroscience

Brain cognition gaps reveal associations with dopamine and factors related to brain health through artificial intelligence prediction of functional connectome

1. Morteza Esmaeili
2. Erin Beate Bjørkeli
3. Robin Pedersen
4. Farshad Falahati
5. Jarkko Johansson
6. Kristin Nordin
7. Nina Karalija
8. Lars Bäckman
9. Lars Nyberg
10. Alireza Salami

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This multimodal neuroimaging study leverages fMRI, PET, and deep learning to predict memory performance. The authors introduce the brain-cognition gap to link these different imaging modalities to cognition and evaluate their results in two independent cohorts. The results are solid and provide an important contribution to the literature and will be of interest to neuroscientists working at the interface of cognition, neuroimaging.

Reviewed by eLife

Thalamo-accumbal circuit adaptations following extended oxycodone abstinence

1. Yanaira Alonso Caraballo
2. Yan Li
3. Nicholas J Constantino
4. Megan A Neal
5. Gillian S Driscoll
6. Yunona Manasian
7. Grace K Cai
8. Maria Mavrikaki
9. Vadim Y Bolshakov
10. Elena Chartoff

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable manuscript by Alonso-Caraballo et al is a novel piece of work that examines the impact of oxycodone self-administration on neural plasticity within paraventricular thalamic (PVT) to nucleus accumbens shell (Shell) pathway - two regions shown to play a key role in cue-induced drug seeking on their own - and whether this plasticity varies based on abstinence period and biological sex. Data show that a clinically relevant long-access model of self-administration promotes dependence in both male and female rats and provide compelling data that when compared to current literature indicate that craving-induced relapse for opioids may develop faster and may be more pronounced in females compared to males. In addition to these behavioral findings, the authors provide the first evidence that glutamate signaling within the PVT-to-Shell pathway is selectively strengthened at the output medium spiny neurons by opioids following protracted, but not acute abstinence. These data highlight a potential role for these adaptations in relapse behavior and identify a potential therapeutic target during abstinence to reduce relapse risk in abstaining individuals.

Reviewed by eLife

Excitation–inhibition balance controls coupling stability and network reorganization in a plastic Kuramoto model

1. Satoshi Kuroki
2. Kenji Mizuseki

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This useful study investigates how plasticity and homeostatic adaptation can lead to the emergence of synchronization patterns associated with different sleep phases. The ideas are novel and interesting, but the evidence at present remains incomplete. Further work is needed to determine whether the reported states persist for larger system sizes, longer integration times, and how robust the results are to different initial conditions.

Reviewed by eLife

Neural computations in the foveal and peripheral visual fields during active search

1. Jie Zhang
2. Xiaocang Zhu
3. Zhengyu Ma
4. Shanshan Wang
5. Yutian Wang
6. Hossein Esteky
7. Yonghong Tian
8. Huihui Zhou

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study reports important and invaluable findings that advance understanding of how attention is distributed between what we look at directly and what lies outside the center of gaze during active visual search. The evidence supporting the main claims is solid, with a large and rich dataset spanning multiple brain areas, although some aspects of the interpretation would benefit from additional controls and clearer separation of attention from eye-movement planning. The work will be of particular interest to researchers studying attention, visual perception, and eye movements behavior.

Reviewed by eLife

Frequency and laminar profile of feature-specific visual activity revealed by interleaved EEG–fMRI

1. Tommy Clausner
2. José P Marques
3. René Scheeringa
4. Mathilde Bonnefond

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This fundamental study uses simultaneous EEG and fMRI recordings to shed light on the relationship between alpha and gamma oscillations and specific cortical layers. The sophisticated methodology provides compelling evidence for correlations between oscillatory power and the strength and contents of fMRI signals in different cortical layers. This paper will be of interest to neuroscientists studying the role and mechanisms of alpha and gamma oscillations.

Reviewed by eLife

The openretina Project: Collaborative Retina Modelling Across Datasets and Species

1. Federico D’Agostino
2. Thomas Zenkel
3. Baptiste Lorenzi
4. Michaela Vystrčilová
5. Dominic Gonschorek
6. Samuel Suhai
7. Samuele Virgili
8. Alexander S Ecker
9. Olivier Marre
10. Larissa Höfling
11. Thomas Euler
12. Matthias Bethge

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This manuscript presents openretina, an open-source platform that integrates retinal datasets, model training, benchmarking, and in silico analysis tools within a unified framework. The resource is valuable because it addresses long-standing challenges in reproducibility, accessibility, and cross-study comparison in computational retina research, while providing a foundation for community-driven model development and evaluation. The supporting evidence is solid, with the authors demonstrating a functional and well-documented platform across multiple datasets and species, although a clearer discussion of model interpretability, current performance limitations, and data quality standards would strengthen the resource.

Reviewed by eLife

Neurons, Muscles, and Venom: Elucidating a Neural-to-Secretory Pathway in Cephalopod Predation

1. Kim N. Kirchhoff
2. José Ramón Pardos-Blas
3. Amy Courtney
4. Belkes Stambouli
5. Andrew L. Sugarman
6. Daniel J. Vanselow
7. Melvin Williams
8. Christian Carrasco
9. Mariam Gelashvilli
10. Cecilia Cuddy
11. Praveena Naidu
12. William R. Schafer
13. Keith C. Cheng
14. Eve Seuntjens
15. Mandë Holford

Reviewed by Review Commons

Visuomotor mismatch EEG responses over occipital cortex of freely moving human subjects

1. Magdalena Solyga
2. Marek Zelechowski
3. Georg B Keller

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study demonstrates that self-motion strongly affects neural responses to visual stimuli, comparing humans moving through a virtual environment to passive viewing. The evidence for visuomotor mismatch responses is solid, although the interpretation in terms of prediction remains somewhat preliminary. This study bridges human and rodent studies on the role of prediction in sensory processing, and is therefore expected to be of interest to a large community of neuroscientists.

Reviewed by eLife

Human brain-wide activation of sleep rhythms

1. Haiteng Wang
2. Qihong Zou
3. Jinbo Zhang
4. Jia-Hong Gao
5. Yunzhe Liu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The study presents important findings from a very rich EEG-fMRI dataset including 107 participants, which was collected during nocturnal naps. Using overall solid methods, the authors link activity in memory related brain regions (e.g., hippocampus, thalamus, and medial prefrontal cortex), as well as their functional connectivity, to the occurrence of canonical sleep rhythms (spindles and slow oscillations) during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. This work will be of broad interest to researchers studying sleep, memory, and related domains.

Reviewed by eLife

Behavioural and neurogenetic evidence for emotion primitives in the fruit fly Drosophila from an open field test

1. Yi Lueningschroer-Wang
2. Emilia Derksen
3. Hannah Wilde
4. Maria Steigmeier
5. Christian Wegener

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This useful study reports findings that support the use of the Open Field Test in Drosophila as a model to study "emotion-like states", which are behavioral responses to several stressful or aversive treatments, and resilience upon their subsequent removal. Behavioral data, by employing established stress-causing treatments and genetic manipulations, are solid. The main advance of this work over previous Drosophila work using a similar experimental setup is systematic analysis of various stressors.

Reviewed by eLife