Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This study presents a large-scale characterization of single-neuron responses during reading and listening, enabling examination of both 'low-level' (orthographic/phonological) and 'higher-level' (syntactic) features, as well as links between single-neuron activity and multi-scale field potentials, making it a valuable resource for bridging micro- and macroscale accounts of language processing. The analyses identify modality-specific and putatively modality-independent responses across distributed brain regions, offering an intriguing framework for understanding how sensory-specific and abstract representations may relate. However, the evidence supporting the central claims is currently incomplete, due to limited population-level quantification, insufficient statistical characterization of how many neurons encode the relevant features, ambiguity in the interpretation of encoding model results, and a lack of rigorous tests of cross-modal generalization and alternative accounts, which together weaken the conclusions about amodal representations and hierarchical processing.

eLife assessment

This is a valuable survey of movements and locomotor patterns produced by circuits in the medial reticular formation (MRF) of the brainstem. The authors provide solid evidence that activation of GABAergic MRF neurons slowed down walking, activation of glutamatergic neurons induced a specific "shuffle" limb trajectory, and the activation of serotonergic neurons increased locomotor speed without affecting walking signature. This study adds to the growing body of knowledge about the effects of brainstem circuits on specific aspects of locomotor function.

eLife Assessment

This important study examines the effects of diet and exercise on brain structure and behaviour in the 3xTg mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. They show that combined access to a low-fat diet and exercise improves regional brain volume and behaviour in transgenic and wild-type control mice in a sex-specific manner, with analyses linking functional improvements to glucose homeostasis. Although some claims are well supported, the overall strength of the evidence is incomplete and hampered by a lack of clarity regarding the statistical analyses chosen. The work may be of interest to researchers studying neurodegenerative disease, particularly in preclinical contexts.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study uses large-scale 7T naturalistic fMRI data and nonlinear pRF modeling to map the tonotopic organization of the human auditory cortex, linking spectral tuning to speech selectivity and cortical hierarchy. The evidence is solid, demonstrating that movie-based stimuli can recover robust population-level auditory maps and offering tools for leveraging existing datasets, although there is room for improvement in relating static tonotopy to dynamic speech processing and in presentation clarity. The study will be of interest to a broad audience working on auditory cortex organization and mapping.