Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This valuable study presents a plastic recurrent spiking network model that spontaneously generates repeating neuronal sequences under unstructured inputs. The authors provide solid evidence that, while the global weight distribution stabilizes, individual synaptic connections undergo constant turnover with strength-dependent timescales, supporting sequence generation. However, the study is purely simulation-based and phenomenological, lacking both a mechanistic explanation for sequence emergence and explicit experimental predictions, and robustness to alternative, more biologically realistic plasticity rules remains to be demonstrated. The work will be of interest to theoretical and experimental neuroscientists working on synaptic plasticity and neural sequence generation.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript presents important findings that challenge traditional models of speech processing by demonstrating that theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling in the auditory cortex is primarily a stimulus-driven alignment to external acoustic structures rather than an intrinsic neural oscillatory mechanism. The evidence supporting these claims is convincing, grounded in a robust cross-linguistic acoustic analysis and high-fidelity, time-resolved intracranial recordings.

eLife Assessment

This is a potentially important study comparing infants (8 months) and adults with respect to rhythmic EEG response properties during periodic and aperiodic visual stimulation. The results provide solid evidence for a ~4 Hz EEG response in infants that emerges independently of stimulation frequency. At this stage, additional work will be required to conclusively establish that this theta-band effect reflects genuine neural resonance rather than oculomotor processes.

eLife Assessment

Shin et al present important new observations regarding novel REM-specific cortical high-frequency oscillations. The evidence demonstrating the presence of a novel rhythm is convincing. However, the data presented is incomplete to demonstrate claims of a) brain-state-specific effects of these events, b) clear structured reactivation, and c) the specific degree of linkage to memory consolidation.

eLife Assessment

This important study shows that orientation tuning of V1 neurons is suppressed during a continuous flash suppression paradigm, especially in neurons with binocular receptive fields. These findings, made using cutting-edge imaging techniques, convincingly implicate early visual processing in continuous flash suppression, in agreement with previous studies suggesting reduced effective contrast of such stimuli in V1.

eLife Assessment

This important study examined age-related changes in cerebellar function by testing a large sample of younger and older adults, including 30 over 80 years old, on motor and cognitive tasks linked to the cerebellum and conducting structural imaging. Their findings show that cerebellar-dependent functions are mostly maintained or even enhanced across the lifespan, with cerebellar-mediated motor abilities remaining intact despite degeneration, in contrast to non-cerebellar measures. Overall, the authors provide compelling evidence in support of preserved cerebellar function with age. These results highlight the resilience and redundancy of cerebellar circuits and offer key insights into aging and motor behavior.

eLife Assessment

This study resolves a cryo-EM structure of the GPCR, human GPR30, which responds to bicarbonate and regulates cellular responses to pH and ion homeostasis. Understanding the ligand and the mechanism of activation is important to the field of receptor signaling and potentially facilitates drug development targeting this receptor. Structures and functional assays provide solid evidence for a potential bicarbonate binding site.

eLife Assessment

This study offers valuable insights into how humans detect and adapt to regime shifts, highlighting dissociable contributions of the frontoparietal network and ventromedial prefrontal cortex to sensitivity to signal diagnosticity and transition probabilities. The combination of an innovative instructed-probability task, Bayesian behavioural modelling, and model-based fMRI analyses provides solid support for the main claims. The addition of new model-comparison figures in revision effectively addresses the previously noted potential confound between posterior switch probability and time in the neuroimaging results. At the behavioural level, while the computational model captures the pattern of "system neglect" well, qualitatively distinct mechanisms, such as hyper-prior attraction toward experiment-wise mean parameters, reporting biases, or probability-outlier underweighting, could produce similar behavioural signatures and cannot be fully disambiguated with the current design alone; however, converging evidence from the authors' prior work partially mitigates this concern.

eLife Assessment

This important study explores how the phase of neural oscillations in the alpha band affects visual perception, indicating that perceptual performance varies due to changes in sensory precision rather than decision bias. The evidence is convincing in its experimental design and analytical approach. This work should interest cognitive neuroscientists who study perception and decision-making.

eLife Assessment

Using single-cell transcriptomic data from mouse inner ear hair cells, the authors compare for the first time gene expression across the four recognized hair cell types in adults, generating information fundamental to understanding hair cell relationships between the ancient vestibular compartment and the more recent cochlea. Among observed differences, compelling evidence is provided for the expression in vestibular hair cells but not cochlear hair cells of certain ciliary motility-related genes, suggesting that the kinocilium of vestibular hair cells may function as an active force generator to increase sensitivity.