Neuroscience

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

Modeling and simulation of neocortical micro- and mesocircuitry (Part I, anatomy)

1. Michael W Reimann
2. Sirio Bolaños-Puchet
3. Jean-Denis Courcol
4. Daniela Egas Santander
5. Alexis Arnaudon
6. Benoît Coste
7. Fabien Delalondre
8. Thomas Delemontex
9. Adrien Devresse
10. Hugo Dictus
11. Alexander Dietz
12. András Ecker
13. Cyrille Favreau
14. Gianluca Ficarelli
15. Mike Gevaert
16. Joni Herttuainen
17. James B Isbister
18. Lida Kanari
19. Daniel Keller
20. James King
21. Pramod Kumbhar
22. Samuel Lapere
23. Jãnis Lazovskis
24. Huanxiang Lu
25. Nicolas Ninin
26. Fernando Pereira
27. Judit Planas
28. Christoph Pokorny
29. Juan Luis Riquelme
30. Armando Romani
31. Ying Shi
32. Jason P Smith
33. Vishal Sood
34. Mohit Srivastava
35. Werner Van Geit
36. Liesbeth Vanherpe
37. Matthias Wolf
38. Ran Levi
39. Kathryn Hess
40. Felix Schürmann
41. Eilif B Muller
42. Henry Markram
43. Srikanth Ramaswamy

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This manuscript reports a detailed model of juvenile rat somatosensory cortex, consisting of 4.2 million morphologically and biophysically detailed neuron models, arranged in space and connected according to diverse experimental data - a valuable tool for the field. The construction of the model is based on a methodology with solid supporting evidence. It should be noted that, by necessity, such a large-scale model development involves many assumptions, interpolations, and decisions that could have compounding downstream effects on further analyses that may be difficult to disambiguate.

Reviewed by eLife

Modulation of RNA processing genes during sleep-dependent memory

1. Yongjun Li
2. Nitin S Chouhan
3. Shirley L Zhang
4. Rebecca S Moore
5. Sara B Noya
6. Joy Shon
7. Zhifeng Yue
8. Amita Sehgal

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The aim of this important study is to identify novel genes involved in sleep regulation and memory consolidation. It combines transcriptomic approaches following memory induction with measurements of sleep and memory to discover molecular pathways underlying these interlinked behaviors. The authors explore transcriptional changes in specific mushroom body neurons and suggest roles for two genes involved in RNA processing, Polr1F and Regnase-1, in the regulation of sleep and memory. Their findings offer convincing evidence that the expression of RNA processing genes is modulated during sleep-dependent memory, with Polr1F potentially contributing to increased sleep.

Reviewed by eLife