Neuroscience

Inferring control objectives in a virtual balancing task in humans and monkeys

1. Mohsen Sadeghi
2. Reza Sharif Razavian
3. Salah Bazzi
4. Raeed H Chowdhury
5. Aaron P Batista
6. Patrick J Loughlin
7. Dagmar Sternad

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study represents a step towards integrating human and non-human primate research towards a broader understanding of the neural control of motor strategies. It could offer valuable insights into how humans and non-human primates (Rhesus monkeys) manage visuomotor tasks, such as stabilizing an unstable virtual system, potentially leading to discoveries in neural behaviour mechanisms. While the evidence is mostly solid, some results, particularly from the binary classification of control strategies for non instructed behaviour, require further validation before it could be conclusively interpreted.

Reviewed by eLife

Indistinguishable network dynamics can emerge from unalike plasticity rules

1. Poornima Ramesh
2. Basile Confavreux
3. Pedro J. Gonçalves
4. Tim P. Vogels
5. Jakob H. Macke

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This work presents a valuable data-driven method to extract the "true" synaptic plasticity rule (or learning rule) operating in a neural circuit from empirical measurements of neural activity. The approach aims to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) to match neural activity measurements in terms of statistics, learning them from the data, rather than being pre-determined by the experimenter. The main conclusion is that the extracted learning rules are not unique, but rather degenerate, meaning that multiple plasticity rules can produce the same neural activity. Although the paper presents a thorough investigation using one learning rule as a case study (the Oja rule), the evidence that the results can be inferred beyond the specific numerical experiments presented in the paper is incomplete.

Reviewed by eLife

Assembly of neuron- and radial glial-cell-derived extracellular matrix molecules promotes radial migration of developing cortical neurons

1. Ayumu Mubuchi
2. Mina Takechi
3. Shunsuke Nishio
4. Tsukasa Matsuda
5. Yoshifumi Itoh
6. Chihiro Sato
7. Ken Kitajima
8. Hiroshi Kitagawa
9. Shinji Miyata

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  The solid study addresses the role of extracellular matrix (ECM) in neuronal migration. The authors showed that the interaction between the ternary complex formed by tenascin-C, the chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan neurocan, and hyaluronic acid is important for the multipolar to bipolar transition in the intermediate zone (IZ) of the developing cortex

Reviewed by eLife

Emergence of brain-like mirror-symmetric viewpoint tuning in convolutional neural networks

1. Amirhossein Farzmahdi
2. Wilbert Zarco
3. Winrich A Freiwald
4. Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
5. Tal Golan

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This computational study is a valuable empirical investigation into the common trait of neurons in brains and artificial neural networks: responding effectively to both objects and their mirror images and it focuses on uncovering conditions that lead to mirror symmetry in visual networks and the evidence convincingly demonstrates that learning contributes to expanding mirror symmetry tuning, given its presence in the data. Additionally, the paper delves into the transformation of face patches in primate visual hierarchy, shifting from view specificity to mirror symmetry to view invariance. It empirically analyzes factors behind similar effects in two network architectures, and key claims highlight the emergence of invariances in architectures with spatial pooling, driven by learning bilateral symmetry discrimination and importantly, these effects extend beyond faces, suggesting broader relevance. Despite strong experiments, some interpretations lack explicit support, and the paper overlooks pre-training emergence of mirror symmetry.

Reviewed by eLife

Brain representations of motion and position in the double-drift illusion

1. Noah J Steinberg
2. Zvi N Roth
3. J Anthony Movshon
4. Elisha Merriam

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This study is an elegant imaging experiment in humans that shows that visual area hMT+, but not other candidate brain areas, signal the perceived motion path in a visual drift illusion. Using a powerful computational decoding approach, the results show a perceptual representation of the illusory position in space for moving stimuli even when the actual retinal position of the stimulus is kept stable. Such a representation and the underlying neural mechanisms are of broad importance for our understanding of the neural basis of sensory perception.

  (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Finding structure during incremental speech comprehension

1. Bingjiang Lyu
2. William D Marslen-Wilson
3. Yuxing Fang
4. Lorraine K Tyler

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This valuable study provides insights into how the brain parses the syntactic structure of a spoken sentence. Convincing evidence is provided that distributive cortical networks are engaged for incremental parsing of a sentence, and neural activity recorded by MEG correlates with sentence structure measures extracted by a deep neural network language model, i.e., BERT. A contribution of the work is to use a deep neural network model to quantify how the mental representation of syntactic structure updates as a sentence unfolds in time.

Reviewed by eLife

Using synchronized brain rhythms to bias memory-guided decisions

1. John J Stout
2. Allison E George
3. Suhyeong Kim
4. Henry L Hallock
5. Amy L Griffin

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study enhances our understanding of the relationship between cortico-hippocampal interactions and behavioral performance. Using an inter-areal coherence metric to gate trial initiation in real time, the authors provide solid evidence that links high hippocampal-prefrontal theta coherence to correct performance on spatial working memory and cue-guided decision-making tasks. Although reviewers agreed that the results do not demonstrate causality between hippocampal-prefrontal synchrony and behavioral performance, the findings are viewed as important given their potential implications for brain-machine interface applications in humans.

Reviewed by eLife

Stimulation of VTA dopamine inputs to LH upregulates orexin neuronal activity in a DRD2-dependent manner

1. Masaya Harada
2. Laia Serratosa Capdevila
3. Maria Wilhelm
4. Denis Burdakov
5. Tommaso Patriarchi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents valuable findings that expand our view of dopamine release in different brain regions and show that dopamine release in the lateral hypothalamus is related to the activity of orexin neurons. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, although inclusion of tests that directly assess causality of the noble pathways would have been even more conclusive. The work will be of interest of neuroscientists who study the neural basis of motivation.

Reviewed by eLife

Social touch shapes communication and animal recognition in naked mole-rats

1. Ryan Schwark
2. Simon Ogundare
3. Preston Sheng
4. William Foster
5. Phalaen Chang
6. Yu-Young Tsai
7. Amanda Arnold
8. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Causal role of the frontal eye field in attention-induced ocular dominance plasticity

1. Fangxing Song
2. Xue Dong
3. Jiaxu Zhao
4. Jue Wang
5. Xiaohui Sang
6. Xin He
7. Min Bao

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study combines psychophysics, fMRI, and TMS to reveal a causal role of FEF in generating an attention-induced ocular dominance shift, with potential relevance for clinical applications. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is convincing. The work will be of broad interest to perceptual and cognitive neuroscience.

Reviewed by eLife