Neuroscience

The pupillary light response as a physiological index of aphantasia, sensory and phenomenological imagery strength

1. Lachlan Kay
2. Rebecca Keogh
3. Thomas Andrillon
4. Joel Pearson

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This is an interesting study of the relation between vividness of visual imagery and the pupillary light response that can result from it. It provides evidence for the absence of imagery in individuals that self-report as aphantasic. The results will likely be of interest to researchers in a range of disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. There were some shared concerns related to demand characteristics and eye movements, and the authors might be able to address these concerns with more data analysis and/or control experiments.

  (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 #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.”)

Reviewed by eLife

Social-affective features drive human representations of observed actions

1. Diana C Dima
2. Tyler M Tomita
3. Christopher J Honey
4. Leyla Isik

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This study investigates and characterizes the representations of actions in naturalistic movie stimuli. The combination of the analytical techniques and stimulus domain make the paper likely to be of broad interest to scientists interested in action representation amidst complex sequences. This paper will potentially broaden our understanding of visual action representation and the extraction of such information in natural settings, but clarification of the analyses and aspects of the data are required to strengthen 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 #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Contextual control of conditioned pain tolerance and endogenous analgesic systems

1. Sydney Trask
2. Jeffrey S Mogil
3. Fred J Helmstetter
4. Cheryl L Stucky
5. Katelyn E Sadler

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This study covers a series of experiments designed to characterize conditioned pain processing using a novel animal model in which mechanical nociception (von Frey test) is assessed following exposure to contextual cues that have been paired with visceral pain (intraperitoneal acid injection). These experiments address an important topic from a translational perspective, both because learning is an important but understudied contributor to the human pain experience and because there is evidence for sex differences in human pain expression. The results reveal that such cues exert complex, dose- and sex-dependent effects on pain processing that will be of broad interest to researchers across fields of associative learning, neuroscience, and pain research.

  (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 names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Cold protection allows local cryotherapy in a clinical-relevant model of traumatic optic neuropathy

1. Yikui Zhang
2. Mengyun Li
3. Bo Yu
4. Shengjian Lu
5. Lujie Zhang
6. Senmiao Zhu
7. Zhonghao Yu
8. Tian Xia
9. Haoliang Huang
10. WenHao Jiang
11. Si Zhang
12. Lanfang Sun
13. Qian Ye
14. Jiaying Sun
15. Hui Zhu
16. Pingping Huang
17. Huifeng Hong
18. Shuaishuai Yu
19. Wenjie Li
20. Danni Ai
21. Jingfan Fan
22. Wentao Li
23. Hong Song
24. Lei Xu
25. Xiwen Chen
26. Tongke Chen
27. Meng Zhou
28. Jingxing Ou
29. Jian Yang
30. Wei Li
31. Yang Hu
32. Wencan Wu

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The manuscript by Zhang et al. describes the combined use of a new surgical procedure and therapeutic hypothermia to deliver local therapy to the optic nerve in large mammals. In addition, the work describes a novel computer program that can optimize surgical approaches to access the optic nerve endonasally by using anatomical parameters obtained by tomography scan. The study represents a significant step forward in the use of therapeutic hypothermia in the treatment of ocular conditions and is of interest to neurobiologists studying therapeutic interventions for acute trauma to the optic nerves or to other regions of the central nervous system.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Dopamine D2Rs coordinate cue-evoked changes in striatal acetylcholine levels

1. Kelly M Martyniuk
2. Arturo Torres-Herraez
3. Daniel C Lowes
4. Marcelo Rubinstein
5. Marie A Labouesse
6. Christoph Kellendonk

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The study addressed interactions between two key striatal transmitters, dopamine and acetylcholine during an appetitive behavioral task. Helping to reconcile conflicting evidence in the literature, the data show that changes in both transmitters are correlated and that decreases in acetylcholine with reward and reward cues is only partially a consequence of elevated dopamine release acting at D2 dopamine receptors on striatal cholinergic interneurons. The behavioral significance of this correlation remains to be fully clarified. This manuscript will be of interest to those interested in the neural correlates of appetitive behavior and dopamine and striatal function.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

A dynamic clamp protocol to artificially modify cell capacitance

1. Paul Pfeiffer
2. Federico José Barreda Tomás
3. Jiameng Wu
4. Jan-Hendrik Schleimer
5. Imre Vida
6. Susanne Schreiber

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The manuscript introduces a new enhancement to the dynamic clamp technique, CapClamp that, analogous to the artificial conductances of standard Dynamic Clamp, allows the experimenter to adjust the somatic time constant by setting a new membrane artificial capacitance independent of any change in input resistance. The technique is shown to have application for studying temporal integration, energetic costs of spiking and bifurcations. The technique is rigorously tested in model and physiological application and is robust when sampling frequency of the feedback (clamp) loop is fast compared to the fastest electrical event in a neuron (usually action potentials), and for vertebrate neurons it should be 20KHz or faster and yet faster for fast spiking neurons.

  (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 names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Sleep and circadian rhythm disruption alters the lung transcriptome to predispose to viral infection

1. Lewis Taylor
2. Felix Von Lendenfeld
3. Anna Ashton
4. Harshmeena Sanghani
5. Simona Di Pretoro
6. Laura Usselmann
7. Maria Veretennikova
8. Robert Dallmann
9. Jane A. McKeating
10. Sridhar Vasudevan
11. Aarti Jagannath

Reviewed by ScreenIT

Putting the theory into ‘burstlet theory’ with a biophysical model of burstlets and bursts in the respiratory preBötzinger complex

1. Ryan S Phillips
2. Jonathan E Rubin

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript is of significant interest to readers in the field of neural control of breathing and for researches interested in the generation of biological rhythms in general. The study assembles a sophisticated computational modelling approach to test long-standing theories and emerging views in neural control of breathing and more specifically on biophysical mechanisms of burstlet generation in the respiratory network (the preBötzinger complex network). This work is an important contribution to a better understanding of the respiratory rhythm generation, will help validate (or not) running hypotheses and will guide future experiments.

  (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 #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

No evidence from complementary data sources of a direct glutamatergic projection from the mouse anterior cingulate area to the hippocampal formation

1. Lilya Andrianova
2. Steliana Yanakieva
3. Gabriella Margetts-Smith
4. Shivali Kohli
5. Erica S Brady
6. John P Aggleton
7. Michael T Craig

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  In this study, the authors attempted to further examine the existence of a potential direct projection from the anterior cingulate cortex to the hippocampus which has important functional implication but is currently supported by only one major publication in the literature. They used distinct anterograde et retrograde viral tracing strategies and analyzed the data available in the Allen atlas but found no evidence in support of the existence of this connection.

  (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 #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Neuronal apoptosis drives remodeling states of microglia and shifts in survival pathway dependence

1. Sarah Rose Anderson
2. Jacqueline M Roberts
3. Nathaniel Ghena
4. Emmalyn A Irvin
5. Joon Schwakopf
6. Isabelle B Cooperstein
7. Alejandra Bosco
8. Monica L Vetter

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This work convincingly provides important novel mechanisms on how microglial states are shaped during retinal development, an important question that should be of interest for a broad readership.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife