Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This study addresses a key question in developmental cognitive neuroscience by identifying early neural correlates of variability in language learning and showing how syllable tracking and word segmentation develop from birth to two years in infants with differing likelihoods of autism. The evidence is generally strong, with rigorous longitudinal EEG acquisition, careful preprocessing, and validated statistical approaches, though several methodological clarifications would further strengthen confidence in the inferences. Overall, the findings offer important insights with clear theoretical implications for understanding early mechanisms of speech perception and statistical learning, supported by convincing evidence.

eLife Assessment

This is an important study showing that movement vigor is not solely an individual property but emerges through interaction when two people are physically linked. The evidence is convincing, supported by a well-controlled experimental design and modeling that closely match the observed behavior. While the authors provided a helpful comparison of several candidate models of human-human interaction dynamics, the statistical power and the statistical analyses could be further improved.

eLife Assessment

This important study combines optogenetic manipulations and wide-field imaging to show that the retrosplenial cortex controls behavioral responses to whisker deflection in a context-dependent manner. The evidence is convincing, but the study would benefit from additional analyses to disentangle the contributions of movement initiation to the recorded neural signals. The paper should be of strong interest to neuroscientists studying cortical mechanisms of sensorimotor processing.

eLife Assessment

This study aims to identify the proteins that make up the electrical synapse, which are much less understood than those of the chemical synapse. These findings represent an important step toward understanding the molecular function of chemical synapses and will have broad utility for the wider neuroscience field. The experimental evidence is convincing.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable finding on how the locus coeruleus modulates the involvement of medial prefrontal cortex in set shifting using calcium imaging. The evidence supporting the claims was viewed as incomplete in comparisons of extra- (EDS) and intradimensional shifts (IDS). The work is of broad interest to those studying flexible cognition.

eLife Assessment

This study introduces a novel method for estimating spatial spectra from irregularly sampled intracranial EEG data, revealing cortical activity across all spatial frequencies, which supports the global and integrated nature of cortical dynamics. It showcases important technical innovations and rigorous analyses, including tests to rule out potential confounds. However, further direct evaluation of the model, for example by using simulated cortical activity with a known spatial spectrum (e.g., an iEEG volume-conductor model that describes the mapping from cortical current source density to iEEG signals, and that incorporates the reference electrodes and the particular montage used), would even further strengthen the incomplete evidence.

eLife Assessment

This important work advances our understanding of the role of kisspeptin neurons in regulating the luteinizing hormone (LH) surge in females. The evidence demonstrating increased neuronal activity in anterior hypothalamic kisspeptin neurons just before the LH surge is compelling, though additional neuroanatomical evidence showing the specificity of the methods would strengthen the study. It also confirms that high circulating levels of estradiol, but also other unidentified factors, are required for the full daily activation. This research will be of interest to reproductive biologists and neuroscientists studying the female ovarian cycle.

eLife Assessment

The goal of this useful study is to examine learning-related changes in neural representations of global and local spatial reference frames in a spatial navigation task. Although the study addresses an interesting question, the evidence for neural representations in the hippocampus and retrosplenial cortex remains incomplete because of confounds in the experimental design and partial data analysis. There are further concerns about the framing of the study in the context of the relevant literature as well as the discussion.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable approach for revealing large-scale brain attractor dynamics during resting states, task processing, and disease conditions using insights from Hopfield neural networks. The evidence supporting the findings is convincing across the many datasets analysed. The work will be of broad interest to neuroscientists using neuroimaging data with interest in computational modelling of brain activity.

eLife Assessment

This is an important account of replay as recency-weighted context-guided memory reactivation that explains a number of empirical findings across human and rodent memory literatures. The evidence is compelling and the work is likely to inspire further adaptions to incorporate additional biological and cognitive features.