Neuroscience

Sleep-learning impairs subsequent awake-learning

1. Simon Ruch
2. Marc Alain Züst
3. Katharina Henke

Reviewed by eLife

Learning excitatory-inhibitory neuronal assemblies in recurrent networks

1. Owen Mackwood
2. Laura B Naumann
3. Henning Sprekeler

Reviewed by eLife

Exposing distinct subcortical components of the auditory brainstem response evoked by continuous naturalistic speech

1. Melissa J Polonenko
2. Ross K Maddox

• Curated by eLife

  Summary: This manuscript describes a type of alteration to speech to make it more peaky, with the goal of inducing stronger responses in the auditory brainstem. Recent work has employed naturalistic speech to investigate subcortical mechanisms of speech processing. However, previous methods were ill equipped to tease apart the neural responses in different parts of the brainstem. The authors show that their speech manipulation improves this: the peaky speech that they develop allows to segregate different waves of the brainstem response. This development may allow further and more refined investigations of the contribution of different parts of the brainstem to speech processing, as well as to hearing deficits.

Reviewed by eLife

Linking minimal and detailed models of CA1 microcircuits reveals how theta rhythms emerge and their frequencies controlled

1. Alexandra Pierri Chatzikalymniou
2. Melisa Gumus
3. Frances K. Skinner

• Curated by eLife

  Summary: This study tackles a difficult problem of understanding the basis for hippocampal theta rhythms through reduction of a highly detailed model, seeking to validate a reduced model that would be more amenable to analysis. The reviewers appreciated the attention to this challenging problem and the substantial work that went into it, but had several fundamental concerns about the methodology, interpretation, and reporting.

Reviewed by eLife

Differential aberrant structural synaptic plasticity in axons and dendrites ahead of their degeneration in tauopathy

1. Johanna S. Jackson
2. James D. Johnson
3. Soraya Meftah
4. Tracey K Murray
5. Zeshan Ahmed
6. Matteo Fasiolo
7. Michael L. Hutton
8. John T.R. Isaac
9. Michael J. O’Neill
10. Michael C. Ashby

• Curated by eLife

  Summary: This paper describes studies of a mouse model of tauopathy with relevance to Alzheimer's Disease. A powerful approach of longitudinal imaging of single synaptic structures over time allows insights into the time course of progressive neurogenerative responses. The strengths of the report are the relevance of the question to human disease, the powerful imaging approach, and the indication that there may be a programmed sequence of structural changes that mediate tauopathy. On the other hand, there were multiple issues with the transgenic mouse model used, which would seriously limit interpretation of results without suitable controls. Further, the data set appeared to be quite noisy, and variable between animals, which may result in part from the nonspecific methods of expressing fluorescent markers, thus leading to uncertainty regarding the specific identity of pre- and post-synaptic elements.

Reviewed by eLife

Brain network reconfiguration for narrative and argumentative thought

1. Yangwen Xu
2. Lorenzo Vignali
3. Olivier Collignon
4. Davide Crepaldi
5. Roberto Bottini

• Curated by eLife

  Summary: The reviewers thought this was a nicely written paper, and were interested in the idea of extending intersubject correlation (ISC) and intersubject functional connectivity (ISFC) work on narratives to arguments. One major concern was that effects reported here may be driven in part by the scrambled conditions. Specifically, the scrambled argument seems to have resulted in stronger and more widespread ISC than the intact argument: this would call into question assumptions about the scrambled version being a control condition. Another, related concern raised is that perhaps argumentative texts are very different from narrative texts: perhaps argumentative texts are less structured, or less interesting (?) and this is why the intact and scrambled versions are so similar. Together with other issues, relating to the interpretation of the findings, it was felt that while of interest, the study's major conclusions could not be justified without additional experiments.

Reviewed by eLife

Can computers understand words like humans do? Comparable semantic representation in neural and computer systems

1. Linmin Zhang
2. Lingting Wang
3. Jinbiao Yang
4. Peng Qian
5. Xuefei Wang
6. Xipeng Qiu
7. Zheng Zhang
8. Xing Tian

Reviewed by eLife

Evoked pain intensity representation is distributed across brain systems: A multistudy mega-analysis

1. Bogdan Petre
2. Philip Kragel
3. Lauren Y. Atlas
4. Stephan Geuter
5. Marieke Jepma
6. Leonie Koban
7. Anjali Krishnan
8. Marina Lopez-Sola
9. Mathieu Roy
10. Choong-Wan Woo
11. Tor D. Wager

Reviewed by eLife

Spinal lumbar dI2 interneurons contribute to stability of bipedal stepping

1. Baruch Haimson
2. Yoav Hadas
3. Nimrod Bernat
4. Artur Kania
5. Monica A Daley
6. Yuval Cinnamon
7. Aharon Lev-Tov
8. Avihu Klar

Reviewed by eLife

Neural signatures of vigilance decrements predict behavioural errors before they occur

1. Hamid Karimi-Rouzbahani
2. Alexandra Woolgar
3. Anina N Rich

Reviewed by eLife