Neuroscience

Enhanced Tactile Coding in Rat Neocortex Under Darkness

1. Kotaro Yamashiro
2. Shiyori Tanaka
3. Nobuyoshi Matsumoto
4. Yuji Ikegaya

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents valuable findings and employs modern analytical approaches on how transient absence of visual input (darkness) affects tactile encoding in the rat somatosensory cortex (S1). The evidence supporting the authors' claims is solid, as population-level neural activity recorded in S1 and decoded by a CNN carries more discriminable texture information in darkness. The underlying basis of this effect remains only partly resolved, however, because it is still unclear which neural features from the CNN drive the decoding and if visual interference is appropriately accounted for, which might confound true neural representational change.

Reviewed by eLife

Human Assembloid Model of Emergent Neurotropic Enteroviruses

1. Christine E. Peters
2. Jimena Andersen
3. Min-Yin Li
4. Lauren Varanese
5. Mayuri Vijay Thete
6. Se-Jin Yoon
7. Taylor Pio
8. Nicholas Thom
9. Xiaoyu Chen
10. Wenjie Qiao
11. Jan E. Carette
12. Sergiu P. Paşca

Reviewed by preLights

Hierarchical cortical plasticity in congenital sight impairment

1. Roni O Maimon-Mor
2. Mahtab Farahbakhsh
3. Nicholas Hedger
4. Andrew T Rider
5. Elaine J Anderson
6. Geraint Rees
7. Tomas Knapen
8. Michel Michaelides
9. Tessa M Dekker

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study examines the stability and compensatory plasticity in the retinotopic mapping in patients with congenital achromatopsia. It provides convincing evidence for a stable mapping of the visual field in V1, alongside changes of the readout from V1 into V3, which shows revised receptive field location and size. This paper would be of interest to scientists studying the visual system, brain plasticity, and development.

Reviewed by eLife

Retinotopic coding organizes the interaction between internally and externally oriented brain networks

1. Adam Steel
2. Peter A Angeli
3. Caroline E Robertson

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study addresses an important question about how large-scale brain networks interact, and specifically how the default mode network exchanges information with the sensory cortex. The analyses are sophisticated, but at present provide incomplete evidence for the claims made in the paper.

Reviewed by eLife

A mechanistic theory of planning in prefrontal cortex

1. Kristopher T Jensen
2. Peter Doohan
3. Mathias Sablé-Meyer
4. Sandra Reinert
5. Alon Baram
6. Thomas Akam
7. Timothy EJ Behrens

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study advances our understanding of the neural substrate of planning trajectories towards a goal by using recurrent neural networks. The manuscript provides solid evidence for most of the claims, but it remains unclear whether the dynamics do indeed bear the defining characteristics of attractors, and the interpretation and scope of some claims may need to be reassessed in light of prior work. The work will be of broad interest to theoretical and systems neuroscientists and to cognitive scientists.

Reviewed by eLife