Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This manuscript examines the functional relationship between neural activities in several cortical areas (such as the primary and secondary motor cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex) and the different sleep states or under anesthesia. The quality of the recordings in infant rats is excellent. Results are important in the field of research into the role of active sleep in the neuronal and circuit mechanisms of early cortical development. Some of the findings presented and hypothesis developed are novel, but the overall demonstration remains incomplete and further in-depth analysis and additional experiments are required to fully support the authors' claims.

eLife assessment

The ability of organisms to cope with environmental stressors can be modified by their physiological conditions as well as life experience. Here, taking advantage of the tractability of the nematode C. elegans, the authors find that exposure to elevated temperatures enhances defenses against peroxides, agents whose toxicity is enhanced by temperature. The finding that a key thermosensory neuron is required for this phenomenon is an important advance in understanding the underlying mechanism; further, the authors' proposal that this is an "enhancer sensing" phenomenon is interesting and thought-provoking. The multidisciplinary approach and mechanistic detail revealed by this work will make it of interest to readers in the fields of sensory biology, signal transduction, and physiology.

eLife assessment

This manuscript investigates how the fly visual system can encode specific features in the presence of self-generated motion. Using volumetric imaging, it explores the encoding of visual features in population activity in the Drosophila visual glomeruli - a set of visual "feature detectors". Through an elegant combination of neural imaging, visual stimulus manipulations, and behavioral analysis, it demonstrates that two different mechanisms, one based on motor signals and one based on visual input, serve to suppress local features during movements that would corrupt these features. The results of this study open up future directions to determine how motor and visual signals are integrated into visual processing at the level of neural circuits.

eLife assessment

This work offers fundamental insights into how asymmetric behavioral features in optokinetic eye movements can be predicted from visual responses of direction-selective neurons in the retina. The electrophysiological experiments and model-based analyses are carefully performed and offer convincing conclusions. The presentation could improve in clarity for a stronger focus on the most important results.

eLife assessment

This paper will be of broad interest to anyone aiming to understand the neural basis of human touch perception. This is an important paper that provides compelling evidence for peripheral tactile encoding of orientation that reflects perceptual capabilities, by using a wide range of stimulus conditions. The results will be valuable to inform both future experiments and computational investigations into the neural representation and processing of small tactile spatial features at the edge of perceptual resolvability and on the emergence of invariant representations in touch more generally.

eLife assessment

When sensory inputs, such as vision or sound, are chronically disabled, the loss of input activity is counterbalanced by the upregulation of synaptic activity. In this study, the authors provide evidence that instead of synapses that directly represent the sensory information, synapses that show correlated intrinsic network activity are the ones that undergo the change upon sensory deprivation. This fundamental and important paper will be useful to readers in the fields of experience-dependent plasticity, sensory cortical coding, and homeostatic plasticity. While the key claims of the manuscript are well supported by the data, minor changes are suggested for clarification, including the fact that the present study has addressed homeostatic responses in adult animals rather than in juvenile animals with which homeostatic plasticity has been actively studied to date.

eLife assessment

This article is a valuable contribution to the field of neuroimaging. The paper proposes a deep neural network for brain extraction that generalises across domains, including species, scanners, and MRI sequences. Although in some sense brain extraction is not a challenging problem for deep learning, domain generalisation can be. The authors provide solid evidence that their approach works though it may need to be precisely matched to the training data.

eLife assessment

Canetta et al. explored the time-dependent effects of inhibition of parvalbumin-positive interneurons in the mouse prefrontal cortex on task learning and cognition. Overall, the study shows that prefrontal cortex PV cell activity during a sensitive period strongly modulates cognitive flexibility and network activity in the adult mouse. This study could progress our understanding of cell behavior in mouse prefrontal cortex.

eLife assessment

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) yields a notoriously noisy and autocorrelated signal, and the GLMsingle method presented here by Prince and colleagues demonstrably improves the estimation of responses evoked by single trials. This open source toolbox is implemented in a user-friendly manner and will be of interest to researchers using human neuroimaging to study neural responses in condition-rich designs, as is increasingly common in cognitive neuroscience experiments.