Neuroscience

eLife assessment

fMRI was used to address an important aspect of human cognition - the capacity for structured representations and symbolic processing - in a cross-species comparison with macaques; the experimental design probed implicit symbolic processing through reversal of learned stimulus pairs. The authors present solid evidence in humans that helps elucidate the role of brain networks in symbolic processing, however the evidence from macaques was necessarily incomplete (e.g., hard-to-quantify differences in learning trajectories and lived experience between species).

eLife assessment

This important work advances our understanding of the differences in locomotion-induced modulation in primate and rodent visual cortexes and underlines the significant contribution cross-species comparisons make to investigating brain function. The evidence in support of these differences across species is convincing. This work will be of broad interest to neuroscientists.

eLife assessment

This manuscript provides a valuable demonstration that distractor effects in multi-attribute decision-making correlate with the form of attribute integration (additive vs. multiplicative). The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing, but there are questions about how to interpret the findings. The manuscript will be interesting to decision-making researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and related fields.

eLife assessment

The aim of this important study is to functionally characterize neuronal circuits underlying the escape behavior in Drosophila larvae. Upon detection of a noxious stimulus, larvae follow a series of stereotyped movements that include bending of their body, rolling and crawling away. This paper combines quantitative behavioral analyses, cell-type specific manipulations, optogenetics, calcium imaging, immunostaining, and connectomic analysis to provide convincing evidence of an inhibitory descending pathway that controls the switch from rolling to fast crawling behaviors of the larval escape response.

eLife assessment

This fundamental work describes the complex interplay between light exposure, hypothalamic activity, and cognitive function. The evidence supporting the conclusion is compelling with potential therapeutic applications of light modulation. The work will be of broad interest to basic and clinical neuroscientists.

eLife assessment

This important study provides new insights into the mechanisms that underlie perceptual and attentional impairments of conscious access. The paper presents convincing evidence of a dissociation between the early stages of low-level perception, which are impermeable to perceptual or attentional impairments, and subsequent stages of visual integration which are susceptible to perceptual impairment but resilient to attentional manipulations. This study will be of interest to scientists working on visual perception and consciousness.

eLife assessment

This study is an important advancement towards the understanding of animal nervous system organization and evolution by providing a compelling description of the entire connectome of the 3-day larva of the marine annelid Platynereis dumerilii. It provides a wealth of data on cell type diversity and the modules that interconnect them. Its strength in the massive amount of high-quality data is also partly a weakness as it can make it difficult to read and scientifically digest. This work lays the foundations for studies on cell type diversity, segmental vs. intersegmental connectivity, and mushroom bodies, but will certainly also be of use to scientists interested in other nervous systems parts, their functions, and evolution.

eLife assessment

This valuable study reports on electrophysiological recording of the spiking activity of single neurons in the entopeduncular nucleus (EPN) in freely-moving mice performing an auditory discrimination task. The data show that the activity of single EPN neurons is modulated by reward and movement kinematics, with the latter further affected by task contexts (e.g. movement toward or away from a reward location). The results provide solid evidence for the conclusions. Reviewer enthusiasm was reduced by the lack of investigations separating confounding factors and ambiguity as to whether the data contain the population of EPN neurons characterized in previous studies that obtained different results. The work will be of interest to those that study how the basal ganglia contribute to behavior, or the mechanisms of learning and/or movement more broadly.

eLife assessment

There is a growing interest in understanding the individuality of animal behaviours. In this article, the authors build and use an impressive array of high throughput phenotyping paradigms to examine the 'stability' (consistency) of behavioural characteristics in a range of contexts and over time. They find that certain behaviours are individualistic and persist robustly across external stimuli while others are less robust to these changing parameters. The data are solid and, with more appropriate statistical methods adopted, the findings have valuable implications for the study of individual variability.

eLife assessment

Yonk and colleagues provide a valuable and timely study showcasing the role of thalamostriatal inputs on learning and action selection. In particular, they provide solid evidence that posterior medial thalamic nucleus (POm) neurons are activated during reward expectation and arousal. A clearer conceptual assessment of the overall function of this circuit, together with sharper analyses of calcium responses and thalamic specificity, in terms of viral spread and striatal target, may further increase the impact of the study.