Neuroscience

Cholinergic blockade reveals a role for human hippocampal theta in memory encoding but not retrieval

1. Tamara Gedankien
2. Jennifer Kriegel
3. Erfan Zabeh
4. David McDonagh
5. Bradley Lega
6. Joshua Jacobs

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important work significantly advances our understanding of the role of human hippocampal theta oscillations in memory encoding and retrieval. The evidence supporting the conclusions is solid, using both scopolamine administration and intracranial EEG recordings. This work will be of broad interest to neuroscientists and has translational implications.

Reviewed by eLife

Dissociable memory modulation mechanisms facilitate fear amnesia at different timescales

1. Yinmei Ni
2. Ye Wang
3. Zijian Zhu
4. Jingchu Hu
5. Daniela Schiller
6. Jian Li

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This manuscript presents valuable findings which reveal an intricate pattern of memory expression following retrieval extinction at different intervals from retrieval-extinction to test. The novel advance is in the demonstration that, relative to a standard extinction procedure, the retrieval-extinction procedure more effectively suppresses responses to a conditioned threat stimulus when testing occurs just minutes after extinction. While the data provide solid evidence that the "short-term" suppression of responding involves engagement of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, there are inconsistencies in the analyses reported which obscure the interpretation and leave some of the claims with limited evidence.

Reviewed by eLife

Detecting Regime Shifts: Neurocomputational Substrates for Over- and Underreactions to Change

1. Mu-Chen Wang
2. George Wu
3. Shih-Wei Wu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study offers valuable insights into how humans detect and adapt to regime shifts, highlighting distinct contributions of the frontoparietal network and ventromedial prefrontal cortex to sensitivity to signal diagnosticity and transition probabilities. The combination of an innovative task design, behavioral modeling, and model-based fMRI analyses provides a solid foundation for the conclusions; however, the neuroimaging results have several limitations, particularly a potential confound between the posterior probability of a switch and the passage of time that may not be fully controlled by including trial number as a regressor. The control experiments intended to address this issue also appear conceptually inconsistent and, at the behavioral level, while informing participants of conditional probabilities rather than requiring learning is theoretically elegant, such information is difficult to apply accurately, as shown by well-documented challenges with conditional reasoning and base-rate neglect. Expressing these probabilities as natural frequencies rather than percentages may have improved comprehension. Overall, the study advances understanding of belief updating under uncertainty but would benefit from more intuitive probabilistic framing and stronger control of temporal confounds in future work.

Reviewed by eLife

Cerebellar climbing fibers impact experience-dependent plasticity in the mouse primary somatosensory cortex

1. Abby Silbaugh
2. Kevin P Koster
3. Christian Hansel

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents a fundamental discovery of how cerebellar climbing fibers modulate plastic changes in the somatosensory cortex by identifying both the responsible cortical circuit and the anatomical pathways. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing and well supported by modern neuroscience methodologies. Overall, this work represents a significant contribution that will be of broad interest to neuroscientists, especially those studying the long-distance cerebellar influence on non-motor brain functions.

Reviewed by eLife

A Signaling Hub in the Mosquito Rectum Coordinates Reproductive Investment After Blood Feeding

1. Chloe Greppi
2. Kyle Frank
3. Victoria Saltz
4. Laura B. Duvall

Reviewed by PREreview

Modality-Agnostic Decoding of Vision and Language from fMRI

1. Mitja Nikolaus
2. Milad Mozafari
3. Isabelle Berry
4. Nicholas Asher
5. Leila Reddy
6. Rufin VanRullen

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The study introduces a valuable dataset for investigating the relationship between vision and language in the brain. The authors provide convincing evidence that decoders trained on brain responses to both images and captions outperform those trained on responses to a single modality. The dataset and decoder results will be of interest to communities studying brain and machine decoding.

Reviewed by eLife

Dynamic regulation of mRNA acetylation at synapses by spatial memory in mouse hippocampus

1. Hai-Qian Zhou
2. Zhen Zhu
3. Jia-Wei Zhang
4. Wei-Peng Lin
5. Hao-JY Jin
6. Yang-Yang Ding
7. Shuai Liu
8. Dong-Min Yin

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  Recent studies have shown that mRNA can be acetylated (ac4c), altering mRNA stability and translation efficiency; however, the role of mRNA acetylation in the brain remains unexplored. In this valuable study, the authors demonstrate that ac4c occurs in synaptically localised mRNAs, mediated by NAT10. Conditional reduction of NAT10 protein levels led to decreases in ac4c of mRNAs and deficits in synaptic plasticity and memory. These solid results suggest that mRNA acetylation may play a role in memory consolidation.

Reviewed by eLife

TRPV3 channel activity helps cortical neurons stay active during fever

1. Yiming Shen
2. Richárd Fiáth
3. Baskar Mohana Krishnan
4. István Ulbert
5. Michelle W Antoine

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This is a valuable study of the physiological mechanisms promoting network activity during fever in the mouse neocortex. The supporting evidence is solid, and has improved with revision, along with increased clarity of presentation.

Reviewed by eLife

Distinct brain mechanisms support trust violations, belief integration, and bias in human-AI teams

1. Luisa Roeder
2. Pamela Hoyte
3. Graham Kerr
4. Peter Bruza
5. Johan N van der Meer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides a useful investigation of human-AI interaction and decision-making, using both behavioral and electrophysiological measures. However, the theoretical framework and experimental design are incomplete, with an unclear task structure and feedback implementation limiting interpretability. With these issues addressed, the work could make a significant contribution to understanding human-AI collaboration.

Reviewed by eLife

Neural coding of multiple motion speeds in visual cortical area MT

1. Xin Huang
2. Bikalpa Ghimire
3. Anjani Sreeprada Chakrala
4. Steven Wiesner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study concerns how macaque visual cortical area MT represents stimuli composed of more than one speed of motion. The study is valuable because little is known about how the visual pathway segments and preserves information about multiple stimuli, and the study involves perceptual reports from both humans and one monkey regarding whether there are one or two speeds in the stimulus. The study presents compelling evidence that (on average) MT neurons shift from faster-speed-takes-all at low speeds to representing the average of the two speeds at higher speeds. Ultimately, this study raises intriguing questions about how exactly the response patterns in visual cortical area MT might preserve information about each speed, since such information could potentially be lost in an average response as described here, depending on assumptions about how MT activity is evaluated by other visual areas.

Reviewed by eLife