Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This study reports the discovery of a new circuit mechanism for light-avoidance behavior in the marine annelid, Platynereis dumerilii. Using calcium imaging, molecular perturbations, behavioral measurements, and modeling, the authors provide compelling evidence that nitric oxide is released by postsynaptic neurons onto ciliary photoreceptors to prolong and enhance their response to ultraviolet light. The fundamental new role of nitric oxide described in this study may be conserved across animal phyla and thus will be of broad interests to neuroscientists and neuroendocrinologists.

eLife assessment

The primary goal of this paper is to examine microtubule detyrosination as a potential therapeutic target for axon regeneration. The valuable findings of this study provide convincing evidence for mechanistic links between microtubule detyrosination and neurite outgrowth in vitro and some evidence for axon regeneration in vivo.

eLife assessment

This important work presents an interesting perspective for the generation and interpretation of phase precession in the hippocampal formation. Through numerical simulations and comparison to experiments, the study provides a convincing theoretical framework explaining the segregation of sequences reflecting navigation and sequences reflecting internal dynamics in the DG-CA3 loop. This study will be of interest for researchers in the spatial navigation and computational neuroscience fields.

eLife assessment

This important study identifies a spatial pattern of neural activity that corresponds to trust in an investment game. It provides a compelling assessment of the validity of this pattern by assessing its expression, or lack thereof, in a variety of datasets. This work, and the "neurometrics" approach it proposes, will be of broad interest to psychology researchers more generally.

eLife assessment

This important study advances our understanding of how listeners understand speech when there are multiple talkers by showing that the content of the speech affects acoustic processing. The evidence is generally solid, although additional details on the methods to allow replication would strengthen the study. The work will be of use to researchers interested in the neuroscience of speech and language processing.

eLife assessment

This manuscript analyzes large-scale Neuropixels recordings from visual areas and hippocampus of mice passively viewing repeated clips of a movie and reports that neurons respond with elevated firing activities to specific, continuous sequences of movie frames. The important results support a role of rodent hippocampal neurons in general episode encoding and advance understanding of visual information processing across different brain regions. The strength of evidence for the primary conclusion was found to be convincing.

eLife assessment

This paper describes a new complexity estimator for time series based on state-space modeling, which can directly decompose signal entropy in both time and frequency. The authors compare their estimator to Lempel-Ziv (LZ) complexity using a variety of time series neurophysiological data from humans and non-human primates. This represents a potentially valuable methodological contribution for existing studies using LZ complexity in their analyses, although the paper currently ignores much of the existing literature which has already developed related solutions to the same issues. The strength of the evidence supporting the superiority of the new complexity metric is currently incomplete, and should be backed by additional analyses.

eLife assessment

This study presents important findings indicating that gradients of functional connectivity are present in the human foetal brain, and that these gradients develop further during gestation, particularly in multisensory brain regions. The study uses state-of-the-art connectomic mapping techniques. However, recent findings suggest that such gradients may reflect confounds within the analysis technique more than underlying brain functions. The evidence for the authors' claims therefore currently appears inadequate as it does not account for these potential confounds.

eLife assessment

This study demonstrates that plasticity of ocular dominance of binocular neurons in the visual thalamus persists in adulthood. The evidence supporting the authors' conclusion is convincing, and the findings are an important contribution to a growing body of work identifying plasticity in the adult visual system. This work will interest those in the field of ocular dominance plasticity in the visual system as well as scientists investigating the function of synaptic plasticity in the brain.

eLife assessment

This behavioral modeling study investigates how humans make decisions on the difficulty of perceptual categorization tasks. The study finds that such judgments are best described by an evidence-accumulation model that includes a dynamic comparison of difficulty-related evidence, which terminates when the difference in evidence between two tasks reaches a predetermined bound – a valuable finding for research in perceptual decision-making. The paper provides compelling behavioral evidence for the proposed model through: 1) quantitative model selection/validation procedures, and 2) qualitative analyses of the relation between the optimal model of the task and the human data (and the proposed model).