Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This valuable study explores the role of Pink1 in regulating mitochondria-organelle contacts and glial function, advancing our understanding of the mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases. The findings highlight key genes and cellular processes that are critical in maintaining neuronal health, with implications for glial biology and Parkinson's disease research. The methodology and data are solid. This work will be of significant interest to researchers in neuroscience, cell biology, and neurodegenerative diseases.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides new insights into the neuronal dynamics of the locus coeruleus in relation to hippocampal sharp-wave ripples. Using high-temporal-resolution, multi-site electrophysiological recordings in rats, the authors present convincing evidence that ripples and locus coeruleus activity are inversely correlated to levels of arousal and noradrenaline tone is modulated by hippocampo-cortical coupling. Overall, the work will be of interest to neuroscientists studying large-scale brain coordination and memory processes.

eLife Assessment

This important study uses a feedback-driven recurrent neural network framework to explore the dynamics underlying learning of BCI decoder perturbations. With convincing evidence, the authors demonstrate that behavioral learning trajectories that match those of primates learning within-manifold and outside-manifold perturbations are likely tied to the dynamical controllability of the network and input-driven learning. This work is likely to motivate a new generation of BCI and learning experiments combining large-scale neural recordings with latent dynamical systems analyses.

eLife Assessment

This important study employed a multi-stage behavioural paradigm of increasing cognitive complexity to investigate the role of inhibitory interneurons in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in avoidance behaviour in mice. The authors used imaging and optogenetic techniques combined with this behavioural task to show that mPFC interneurons are necessary for encoding but not executing avoidance under threat. The evidence supporting these claims is compelling, and findings will be of interest to researchers in behavioural and systems neurosciences.

eLife Assessment

This is a valuable paper that compares various deep learning models, trained with different objective functions, on their ability to predict fMRI data collected during naturalistic video gameplay. The data and analysis provide solid within-distribution evidence that models trained with PPO and imitation learning outperform untrained models and standard convolutional networks. However, the evidence for brittleness in out-of-distribution encoding remains incomplete, as the claim that this stems from the networks' training rather than from alternative causes-like overfitting of ridge regression parameters-is not yet fully supported.

eLife Assessment

This important technical development for neural circuit tracing in larval zebrafish consists in an enhanced rabies virus for improved retrograde transneuronal tracing, supporting a new method for combined structural and functional brain mapping which is demonstrated with compelling evidence. The work will interest zebrafish neurobiologists for the identification of neuronal connectivity patterns while simultaneously monitoring circuit activity.

eLife Assessment

In this valuable study, de Vries and colleagues aim to determine how the perception of biological motion is organized at the neural level, specifically testing whether this process rests on hierarchical predictive processing by extending a methodological framework that the authors previously published. The evidence is solid for the empirical claim that neural representations of body motion systematically lead the stimulus in time, with simulations validating the regression approach and consistent effects on both peak magnitude and peak latency. Support for the stronger theoretical interpretation that these signatures specifically reflect active hierarchical predictive inference requires further substantiation, since the design and analysis do not distinguish such inference from cached associative retrieval or from nonlinear temporal integration of slowly varying features.

eLife Assessment

This study presents analyses of single neuron activity in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) of monkeys performing a decision-making task that manipulates both perceptual evidence and reward. The study shows convincing evidence of distinct subpopulations of neurons in STN that differ in their representations of key quantities related to decision formation. These findings reveal important functional heterogeneity within the STN that helps provide new insights into its contributions to decision processing.

eLife Assessment

The authors present a solid study in the unique conditions of weightlessness providing evidence that movements carried out in 0g are underactuated. They further provide a thorough discussion based on computational modelling to address the question as to whether the CNS underestimates mass when programming movements in weightlessness. In all cases, the persistence of the observed effects in weightlessness has important implications for theories of motor adaptation.

eLife Assessment

By investigating spine nanostructure and dynamics across multiple genetic mouse models for neurodevelopmental disorders, this important study has the potential to uncover convergent or divergent synaptic phenotypes that may be specifically associated with autism versus schizophrenia risk. The imaging and overall breadth of the methods are convincing. The purely in vitro nature of the study slightly limits the generalisability of the findings.