Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

The medicinal leech preparation is an amenable system in which to understand the neural basis of locomotion. Here a previously identified non-spiking neuron was studied in leech and found to alter the mean firing frequency of a crawl-related motoneuron, which fires during the contraction phase of crawling. The findings are valuable and the experiments were diligently done and generally solid; however, the presentation could improve. The work could be taken to the next level by further experiments, and by providing more overall context for the study.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study shows that an odorant that is typically thought of as a repellant actually activates both attractant and repellant olfactory neurons in C. elegans. Solid evidence is provided that nematode worms can integrate signals using different pathways to drive different behavioral responses to the same cue. These findings will be of interest to scientists interested in combinatorial coding in sensory systems.

eLife Assessment

This important research addresses the effects of subjective control and task difficulty on experienced stress using a novel behavioral task in two, large online samples. Convincing evidence is provided, establishing internal and external task validity and a relationship with individual differences in relevant mental health constructs. Evidence for the core claims could be strengthened by disentangling the effects of controllability from those of reward rate and adjusting data parcellation for computing internal consistency. This work will be of interest to psychologists and clinicians studying controllability, stress, and psychopathology.

eLife Assessment

This is a convincing study of the morphological properties of Purkinje cell dendrites and dendritic spines in adult humans and mice, and the anatomical determinants of multi-innervation by climbing fibers. The data will provide an important resource for the field of cerebellar computation.

eLife Assessment

This important Research Advance presents compelling evidence on the neuroprotective effects of reserpine in a well-established model of retinitis pigmentosa (P23H-1). This study builds on previous work establishing reserpine as a neuroprotectant in models of Leber congenital amaurosis. Here authors show reserpine's disease gene-independent influence on photoreceptor survival and emphasizes the importance of considering biological sex in understanding inherited retinal degeneration and the impact of drug treatments on mutant retinas. The work will be of interest to vision researchers as well as a broad audience in translational research.

eLife Assessment

In this important and compelling study, Sánchez-León et al. investigate the effects of tDCS on the firing of single cerebellar neurons in awake and anesthetized mice. They find heterogeneous responses depending on the orientation of the recorded Purkinje cell. The paper may well explain part of the controversial and ambiguous outcomes of various clinical trials.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides significant insights into the dynamics of attentional re-orienting within visual working memory, demonstrating how expected and unexpected memory tests influence attention focus and re-focus. The evidence supporting these conclusions is convincing, with the use of state-of-the-art methodologies. This work will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists studying attention and memory.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study uses state-of-the-art neural encoding and video reconstruction methods to achieve a substantial improvement in video reconstruction quality from mouse neural data, providing a convincing demonstration of how reconstruction performance can be improved by combining these methods. The findings showed that model ensembling and the number of neurons used for reconstruction were key determinants of reconstruction accuracy, but the theoretical contribution to understanding neural encoding was less clear. The treatment of how image masking improved reconstruction performance was also incomplete.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript provides valuable novel insights into the role of interpersonal guilt in social decision-making by showing that responsibility for a partner's bad lottery outcomes influences happiness. Through the integration of neuroimaging and computational modelling methods, and by combining findings from two studies, the authors provide solid support for their claims.

eLife Assessment

This paper provides an important proposal for why learning can be much faster and more accurate if synapses have a fast component that immediately corrects errors, as well as a slower component that corrects behavior averaged over a longer timescale. It is convincingly shown that integrating these two learning timescales improves performance compared to classical strategies, particularly in terms of robustness and generalization when learning new target signals. However, the biological plausibility and justification for the proposed rapid learning mechanism require further elaboration and supporting mechanistic examples.