Neuroscience

Pharyngeal neuronal mechanisms governing sour taste perception in Drosophila melanogaster

1. Bhanu Shrestha
2. Jiun Sang
3. Suman Rimal
4. Youngseok Lee

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This is a useful contribution to our understanding of taste perception. The idea that specific receptors function in the pharynx to mediate responses to carboxylic acids is interesting, although the expression analysis is incomplete. Reviewers also have a number of other suggestions for improvement, including the request that authors provide more details about the methodology used. In general, the claims are supported by solid evidence and add to a growing body of literature on this topic.

Reviewed by eLife, preLights

Endosomal sorting protein SNX4 limits synaptic vesicle docking and release

1. Josse Poppinga
2. Nolan J Barrett
3. L Niels Cornelisse
4. Matthijs Verhage
5. Jan RT van Weering

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study presents a series of results aimed at uncovering the involvement of the endosomal sorting protein SNX4 in neurotransmitter release. While the evidence supporting the conclusions is solid, the molecular mechanisms remain unclear. This paper will be of interest to cell biologists and neurobiologists.

Reviewed by eLife

Fractal cycles of sleep, a new aperiodic activity-based definition of sleep cycles

1. Yevgenia Rosenblum
2. Mahdad Jafarzadeh Esfahani
3. Nico Adelhöfer
4. Paul Zerr
5. Melanie Furrer
6. Reto Huber
7. Famke F Roest
8. Axel Steiger
9. Marcel Zeising
10. Csenge G Horváth
11. Bence Schneider
12. Róbert Bódizs
13. Martin Dresler

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study provides a novel method to detect sleep cycles based on variations in the slope of the power spectrum from electroencephalography signals. The method, dispensing with time-consuming and potentially subjective manual identification of sleep cycles, is supported by solid evidence and analyses. This study will be of interest to researchers and clinicians working on sleep and brain dynamics.

Reviewed by eLife

Temporal dynamics analysis reveals that concurrent working memory load eliminates the Stroop effect through disrupting stimulus-response mapping

1. Yafen Li
2. Yixuan Lin
3. Qing Li
4. Yongqiang Chen
5. Zhifang Li
6. Antao Chen

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study investigates how working memory load influences the Stroop effect from a temporal dynamics perspective. Convincing evidence is provided that the working memory load influences the Stroop effect in the late-stage stimulus-response mapping instead of the early sensory stage. This study will be of interest to both neuroscientists and psychologists who work on cognitive control.

Reviewed by eLife

Visual homogeneity computations in the brain enable solving property-based visual tasks

1. Georgin Jacob
2. RT Pramod
3. SP Arun

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study uses carefully designed experiments to generate a useful behavioural and neuroimaging dataset on visual cognition. The results provide solid evidence for the involvement of higher-order visual cortex in processing visual oddballs and asymmetry. However, the evidence provided for the very strong claims of homogeneity as a novel concept in vision science, separable from existing concepts such as target saliency, is incomplete. The authors and the reviewers do not agree on several points, which are explained in the reviews and author response.

Reviewed by eLife

Dopamine activity encodes the changing valence of the same stimulus in conditioned taste aversion paradigms

1. Maxine K Loh
2. Samantha J Hurh
3. Paula Bazzino
4. Rachel M Donka
5. Alexandra T Keinath
6. Jamie D Roitman
7. Mitchell F Roitman

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study utilizes an elegant approach to examine valence encoding of the mesolimbic dopamine system. The findings are valuable, demonstrating differential responses of dopamine to the same taste stimulus according to its valence (i.e., appetitive or aversive) and in alignment with distinct behavioral responses. The evidence supporting the claims is convincing, resulting from a well-controlled experimental design with minimal confounds and thorough reporting of the data.

Reviewed by eLife

Effects of noise and metabolic cost on cortical task representations

1. Jake Patrick Stroud
2. Michal Wojcik
3. Kristopher Torp Jensen
4. Makoto Kusunoki
5. Mikiko Kadohisa
6. Mark J Buckley
7. John Duncan
8. Mark G Stokes
9. Mate Lengyel

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This work provides a valuable analysis of the effect of two commonly used hyperparameters, noise amplitude and firing rate regularization, on the representations of relevant and irrelevant stimuli in trained recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The results suggest an interesting interpretation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) dynamics, based on comparisons to previously published data from the same lab, in terms of decreasing metabolic cost during learning. The evidence indicating that the mechanisms identified in the RNNs are the same ones operating in PFC was considered incomplete, but could potentially be bolstered by additional analyses and appropriate revisions.

Reviewed by eLife

Bilingualism Modulates Executive Function Development in Pre-School Aged Children: A Preliminary Study

1. Sally Sade
2. Scott Rathwell
3. Bryan Kolb
4. Claudia Gonzalez
5. Robbin Gibb

Reviewed by PREreview

Multisensory integration enhances audiovisual responses in the Mauthner cell

1. Santiago Otero-Coronel
2. Thomas Preuss
3. Violeta Medan

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides valuable advances in our understanding of how inputs from multiple sources can impact the physiology of motor neurons during the process of multisensory integration. Specifically, the authors show how streams of auditory and principally visual information modulate the physiology of Mauthner neurons in goldfish, thus allowing the different senses to influence escape behavior. Supporting evidence is generally convincing, although material reporting the direct control of behavior is less representative of the data.

Reviewed by eLife

Neural evidence of functional compensation for fluid intelligence in healthy ageing

1. Ethan Knights
2. Richard N Henson
3. Alexa Morcom
4. Daniel J Mitchell
5. Kamen A Tsvetanov

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides an important advancement of knowledge by showing neural functional compensation in the brains of healthy older adults completing a fluid-intelligence task. Validated whole-brain voxel-wide analyses and multivariate Bayesian approaches provide compelling evidence that supports the claims of the authors. The work delivers methods for quantifying reserve and compensation in future studies and will be of interest to researchers in the field of the neuroscience of healthy aging.

Reviewed by eLife