Neuroscience

Evaluation Summary:

This paper suggests that assembly of CaV2.3 with b2a/b2e splice variants confers biophysical properties that enable these channels to contribute to calcium-dependent pacemaking in dopaminergic neurons. The findings could have implications for why these neurons are vulnerable to degeneration in Parkinson's disease. The work will be of interest to ion channel biophysicists and neuroscientists.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper proposes that specializations in the outer hair cells' biophysical properties along the cochlea may allow them to amplify the reduced receptor potentials in a manner sufficient to explain all present experimental results. Moreover, the filtering provided by the hair cells may be beneficial for hearing soft high-frequency sounds because it decreases noise and harmonic distortions. Importantly, the amplitude of the relevant motions, even with the low-pass-filtered attenuation, are as large as those measured in the high frequency regions of the cochlea. The authors provide insights and suggestions but the paper lacks strong supportive experimental data to definitively resolve the claimed "apparent" membrane time constant conundrum.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

The authors report that neurons in V1 and V4 provide multiplex information of simultaneously presented objects. A combination of multi-single unit recordings, statistical modelling of neuronal responses and neuronal correlations analyses argues in favor of their claims. Pairs of neurons having similar object preferences tended to be positively correlated when both objects were presented, while pairs of neurons having different objects preferences tended to be negatively correlated. These patterns and others suggest that information about the two objects is multiplexed in time. There are, however, some unclear points that deserve discussion and further analysis that could more strongly support the claims.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper introduces Neuroscout, a new web-based platform for the analysis of fMRI data with a particular focus on naturalistic stimuli. It describes a new tool that will potentially be of great use to the neuroimaging community, and whose development is already quite mature and has a number of datasets ready to use online. Neuroscout as a tool will be of particular interest to neuroimagers and cognitive neuroscientists, but the conclusions drawn using the tool should be of interest to neuroscientists more broadly.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1, Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Mahalingam et al. report on a new software suite, ASAP, the assembly stitching and alignment pipeline, capable of montaging and aligning serial sections at a speed leading to total time shorter than image acquisition time. The software applies to both electron microscopy and array tomography, and more generally to any data set consisting of collections of 2D images in need of in-section montaging and cross-section registration. The result is a coarsely registered volume, ready for refining with existing software suits such as SEAMLESS by Macrina et al. (2021) towards subsequent processing, such as image segmentation and neuronal arbor reconstruction for cellular connectomics. This paper will be of special interest to researchers within the field of connectomics, but also to the broad class of scientists who perform large-scale microscopy. The establishment of fast, reliable and scalable image alignment software to process the millions of images produced by modern microscopes at the same speed as they are acquired is key to accelerate research in neuroscience and other fields. The key claims of the manuscript are well supported by the data, and the approaches used are thoughtful and rigorous.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1, Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

The paper would be of interest to neuroscientists and clinician scientists interested in better understanding the mechanism of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. Using a combination of electrical artifact-free calcium imaging and electrical stimulation, it probes the effects of stimulation on the neural dynamics of basal ganglia structures that correlate with motor improvement. The key claims are well supported with a convincing discussion of the caveats of the methods used.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

McGregor et al. establish a new reinforcement learning paradigm for songbirds, where instead of auditory feedback (white noise) they use mild cutaneous electrical stimulation as a reinforcer. Their data shows that this somatosensory stimulus can aversively drive pitch changes of a targeted syllable in similar manners as an auditory stimulus does. They further show that the anterior forebrain pathway (AFP) and dopaminergic projections to the AFP are necessary for this non-auditory vocal learning by electrolytically lesioning the output nucleus of the AFP and by depleting dopaminergic input to Area X. Their analysis is rigorous and their data convincingly show shared mechanisms for vocal reinforcement learning using white noise (auditory) or cutaneous electrical stimulation (non-auditory).

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This study provides novel evidence that a dopamine D2 receptor antagonist enhances model-based control of behavior, whereas blocking opioid receptors has no effect on the trade-off between habitual responding and goal-directed planning. These conclusions are based on compelling behavioral and computational modeling data and will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists and computational psychiatrists.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

In this paper, the authors find a link between the emergence of functional connectivity (FC) and changes in regional Cerebral Blood Flow (rCBF) in human infancy from birth to 24 months of age, which will be of interest to the increasing field investigating how the establishment of the brain's functional organization is linked to neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions. The data quality and complementarity are impressive for infants over this developmental period (0-2 years). Most of the key claims of the manuscript are well supported by the data. However, the relatively sparse sample and cross-sectional nature does limit interpretation.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Bistable visual perception offers a unique window to study how perception arises and changes via an interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes. In three Magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments with advanced neural state space analysis, this study demonstrates that two key aspects of bistable visual perception - perceptual content and perceptual stability - are mediated by slow cortical potential (SCP) and alpha-beta-band neural oscillations, respectively. The findings would be interesting for many fields, such as perception, consciousness, and attention.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)