Neuroscience

Working Memory Gates Visual Input to Primate Prefrontal Neurons

1. Behrad Noudoost
2. Kelsey L. Clark
3. Tirin Moore

• Curated by eLife

  Summary:

  This is a brief paper documenting the properties of neurons in the frontal eye field (FEF), a cortical brain area traditionally thought to receive visual input and transform it internally to motor commands. The authors used extracellular recordings and electrical microstimulation in behaving non-human primates to add to this view by showing that visual input to FEF from visual area V4 appears to be gated by working -memory activity in FEF. The study was considered well done and interesting, albeit with several important concerns about the interpretation of the findings.

  Reviewer #1 opted to reveal their name to the authors in the decision letter after review.

Reviewed by eLife

Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a Cocktail Party

1. Paz Har-shai Yahav
2. Elana Zion Golumbic

• Curated by eLife

  Summary:

  This study addresses a current and important question: how deeply are "ignored" speech stimuli processed? By imposing a regular rhythm on the to-be-ignored speech and analyzing MEG responses in the frequency domain, you were able to show an increase in power at the phrasal level (1 Hz) of irrelevant speech when It contained structured (linguistic) content, but not at the word level (2 Hz) or the sentence level (0.5 Hz). This finding supports the idea that cortical activity represents syntactic information about the unattended speech. Source analysis shows that the task-irrelevant speech is processed at the sentence level in the left fronto-temporal area and posterior parietal cortex, and in a manner very different from the acoustical encoding of syllables. Though the study is intriguing and well designed, there are some issues that must be addressed to back up the claims of the paper.

  Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 opted to reveal their name to the authors in the decision letter after review.

Reviewed by eLife

Information flow, cell types and stereotypy in a full olfactory connectome

1. Philipp Schlegel
2. Alexander S. Bates
3. Tomke Stürner
4. Sridhar R. Jagannathan
5. Nikolas Drummond
6. Joseph Hsu
7. Laia Serratosa Capdevila
8. Alexandre Javier
9. Elizabeth C. Marin
10. Asa Barth-Maron
11. Imaan F. M. Tamimi
12. Feng Li
13. Gerald M. Rubin
14. Stephen M. Plaza
15. Marta Costa
16. Gregory S.X.E. Jefferis

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This study is a tour-de-force that makes a major contribution to the field. It provides a wealth of information about connectivity in the Drosophila olfactory system, identifying a variety of novel features of its neural organization. The study provides a careful analysis of the practically important and biologically interesting question of stereotypy among animals which previous connectomic studies of the fly brain lacked. A variety of interesting hypotheses are generated. Finally, it establishes a paradigm for the analysis other neural systems.

  (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 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Brainrender : a python-based software for visualizing anatomically registered data

1. F. Claudi
2. A. L. Tyson
3. L. Petrucco
4. T.W. Margrie
5. R. Portugues
6. T. Branco

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper by Claudi et al. will be of interest to any scientist working in neuroanatomy and related fields. Dissemination of scientific results is one of the key products of science, and the software presented here will help scientists achieve that task more easily than ever before.

  (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 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

DREADD-mediated amygdala activation is sufficient to induce anxiety-like responses in young nonhuman primates

1. Sascha A.L. Mueller
2. Jonathan A. Oler
3. Patrick H. Roseboom
4. Nakul Aggarwal
5. Margaux M. Kenwood
6. Marissa K. Riedel
7. Victoria R. Elam
8. Miles E. Olsen
9. Alexandra H. DiFilippo
10. Bradley T. Christian
11. Xing Hu
12. Adriana Galvan
13. Matthew A. Boehm
14. Michael Michaelides
15. Ned H. Kalin

Reviewed by PREreview

BonVision – an open-source software to create and control visual environments

1. Gonçalo Lopes
2. Karolina Farrell
3. Edward A. B. Horrocks
4. Chi-Yu Lee
5. Mai M. Morimoto
6. Tomaso Muzzu
7. Amalia Papanikolaou
8. Fabio R. Rodrigues
9. Thomas Wheatcroft
10. Stefano Zucca
11. Samuel G. Solomon
12. Aman B. Saleem

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Increasingly, neuroscience experiments require immersive virtual environments that approximate natural sensory motor loops while permitting high-bandwidth measurements of brain activity. BonVision is an open-source graphics programming library that allows experimenters to quickly implement immersive 3D visual environments across display hardware and geometry with automated calibration and integration with hundreds of different neural recording technologies, behavioral apparatuses, etc. BonVision standardizes sharing complex, closed-loop visual tasks between labs with vastly different equipment, provides a concrete and easy way to do so, and should be of interest to a wide array of visual systems neuroscientists.

Reviewed by eLife

Unsupervised learning of haptic material properties

1. Anna Metzger
2. Matteo Toscani

Reviewed by eLife

Subjective time is predicted by local and early visual processing

1. Yelena Tonoyan
2. Michele Fornaciai
3. Brent Parsons
4. Domenica Bueti

• Curated by eLife

  Summary: This work uses electro-encephalographic (EEG) recordings combined with an interesting experimental approach to measure temporal expansion/compression. Specifically, the question addressed here is whether adaptation to visual motion affects perceived duration, and if so, how spatially confined these effects are with respect to the processing of the stimulus in early visual areas. The authors find consistent evidence that a visual reference is judged as shorter/longer depending on a previous adaptation. They report several EEG analyses suggesting the early visual activity is correlated with such temporal distortions. This manuscript is of potential interest to cognitive neuroscientists specifically interested in temporal aspects of visual processing and time perception. Although the paradigm is well suited to assess the authors' question, the behavioral data as well as the electrophysiological analyses show important shortcomings currently hindering the interpretation of the results, and necessitating substantial revisions to the current work. Additionally, further methodological details are required to strengthen the manuscript.

Reviewed by eLife

Heritable functional architecture in human visual cortex

1. Ivan Alvarez
2. Nonie J. Finlayson
3. Shwe Ei
4. Benjamin de Haas
5. John A. Greenwood
6. D. Samuel Schwarzkopf

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The paper was viewed as generally sound. There main concern was that the findings were viewed as incremental without a demonstration of a link between the heritability of pRF properties and visual perception. The speculation in the Discussion about shared perceptual experience is intriguing, but psychophysical (or other) evidence would be needed to really make that point clearly. In addition, there was some discussion about the non-independence of vertices and correlation values. In the end, we all agreed that non-independent vertices may inflate correlation coefficient values, but that this is unlikely to substantially affect conclusions drawn from comparisons of monozygotic and dizygotic twins.

  (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

Unveiling the sensory and interneuronal pathways of the neuroendocrine connectome in Drosophila

1. Sebastian Hückesfeld
2. Philipp Schlegel
3. Anton Miroschnikow
4. Andreas Schoofs
5. Ingo Zinke
6. André N Haubrich
7. Casey M Schneider-Mizell
8. James W Truman
9. Richard D Fetter
10. Albert Cardona
11. Michael J Pankratz

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript will be of broad interest to readers in the field of neuroscience. The authors use a serial section transmission electron microscopy data set to trace out the entire neuroendocrine system of a maggot from its sensory input to neuroendocrine cells. It highlights the complexity of brain circuits, describing how parallel processing systems can lead to a multitude of different input combinations for different neuroendocrine cell types and subcircuits. They provide interpretations about functionality of one of described neural circuits. While the analyses are generally rigorous, the functional interpretations need more supporting evidence.

  (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