Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

The authors present a solid study in the unique conditions of weightlessness providing evidence that movements carried out in 0g are underactuated. They further provide a thorough discussion based on computational modelling to address the question as to whether the CNS underestimates mass when programming movements in weightlessness. In all cases, the persistence of the observed effects in weightlessness has important implications for theories of motor adaptation.

eLife Assessment

This study by Roseby and colleagues shows that region-specific mechanosensation - especially anterior-dorsal inputs - controls larval self-righting, and links this to Hox gene function in sensory neurons. The work is important for understanding how body plan cues shape sensorimotor behaviour, and the experimental toolkit will be of use to others. The strength of evidence is compelling with respect to the assays developed and the involvement of the anterior region, the evidence is more limited with respect to the dorso-ventral organization of sensory inputs in that region and the mechanism by which Hox genes contribute to the process. These findings will be of broad interest to researchers studying neural circuits, developmental genetics, and the evolution of behaviour.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript describes convincing and very interesting findings that substantially advance our understanding of a major research question on the role of Cx32 hemichannels in the Schwann cell paranode. It provides an interdisciplinary integration of imaging, in silico approaches, and functional data. This important study proposes a new mechanism with profound physiological relevance and provides new insights into glial modulation of electrical conduction in sensory/motor myelinated nerves.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study reports evidence that items maintained in working memory can bias attention in an oscillatory manner, with the attentional capture effect fluctuating at theta frequency. The study provides solid evidence that this dynamic attentional bias is associated with oscillatory neural mechanisms, particularly in the alpha and theta bands, as measured by EEG. The study will be relevant for researchers studying attention, working memory, and neural oscillations, particularly those interested in how memory and perception interact over time.

eLife Assessment

The authors have presented a study which addresses a recognised gap in the literature, the emergence of the neural correlates of cognitive and affective empathy in children; they introduce a task for measuring both positive and negative empathy in a relatively large group of children aged 3-5. The task was combined with functional near-infrared spectroscopy to examine brain regions involved in the task. The findings are interpreted as providing evidence for the earlier emergence of cognitive than affective empathy. The study represents a valuable contribution to understanding the development of cognitive function, but in its current form, the strength of support for the conclusion is incomplete due to limited support for the comparison to the adult literature and a need to more clearly justify the pre-selected brain regions, their links to empathy and the justification of the hypotheses.

eLife Assessment

Based on several lines of interesting data, the authors conclude that neuronal FMRP, which is associated with stalled ribosomes and mRNP granules, does not determine position on the mRNAs at which ribosomes stall. They instead propose a role in subsequent translational activation of arrested mRNAs. Supported by generally solid experimental data, the paper represents a valuable contribution to the field. The generality of these conclusions, particularly for neurons of different development stages and for different subtypes of mRNP granules, should become clear with future studies that replicate and extend this work.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript represents a valuable contribution to understanding motion processing in the visual cortex. Based on a heterogeneous collection of previous empirical findings, the authors show that the diversity of tuning curves in the middle temporal (MT) area, in response to moving center-surround images, can be explained by Bayesian inference combined with neural sampling. The model rests on strong and solid assumptions about the prior and likelihood; independent evidence that neither of these factors is misspecified would strengthen the work.