Neuroscience

Parabrachial CGRP neurons modulate active defensive behavior under a naturalistic threat

1. Gyeong Hee Pyeon
2. Hyewon Cho
3. Byung Min Chung
4. June-Seek Choi
5. Yong Sang Jo

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important work advances our understanding of parabrachial CGRP threat function. The evidence supporting CGRP aversive outcome signaling is solid, while the evidence for cue signaling and fear behavior generation is incomplete. The work will be of interest to neuroscientists studying defensive behaviors.

Reviewed by eLife

Error prediction determines the coordinate system used for the representation of novel dynamics

1. Raz Leib
2. David Franklin

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides a valuable new perspective on how motor learning occurring in one state generalizes to new states (for example, a different limb posture). The proposed model improves upon previous theories in its ability to predict patterns of generalization, but evidence supporting this specific proposed model over possible alternatives is incomplete. The newly proposed theory appears promising but would be more convincing if its conceptual and theoretical basis were clearer and more rigorously derived.

Reviewed by eLife

Key epigenetic and signaling factors in the formation and maintenance of the blood-brain barrier

1. Jayanarayanan Sadanandan
2. Sithara Thomas
3. Iny Elizabeth Mathew
4. Zhen Huang
5. Spiros L Blackburn
6. Nitin Tandon
7. Hrishikesh Lokhande
8. Pierre D McCrea
9. Emery H Bresnick
10. Pramod K Dash
11. Devin W McBride
12. Arif Harmanci
13. Lalit K Ahirwar
14. Dania Jose
15. Ari C Dienel
16. Hussein A Zeineddine
17. Sungha Hong
18. Peeyush Kumar T

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The specific questions taken up for study by the authors-in mice of HDAC and Polycomb function in the context of vascular endothelial cell (EC) gene expression relevant to the blood-brain barrier, (BBB)-are potentially useful in the context of vascular diversification in understanding and remedying situations where BBB function is compromised. The strength of the evidence presented is incomplete, and to elaborate, it is known that the culturing of endothelial cells can have a strong effect on gene expression.

Reviewed by eLife

Muscarinic receptors mediate motivation via preparatory neural activity in humans

1. John P Grogan
2. Matthias Raemaekers
3. Maaike MH van Swieten
4. Alexander L Green
5. Martin J Gillies
6. Sanjay G Manohar

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The authors have reported an important study in which they use a double-blind design to explore pharmacological manipulations in the context of a behavioral task. While the sample size is small, the use of varied methodology, including electrophysiology, behavior, and pharmacology, makes this manuscript particularly notable. Overall, the findings are solid and motivate future explanations into the relationships between acetylcholine and motivation.

Reviewed by eLife

Decoding contextual influences on auditory perception from primary auditory cortex

1. Bernhard Englitz
2. Sahar Akram
3. Mounya Elhilali
4. Shihab Shamma

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study explores the neural basis for a well known auditory illusion, often utilized in movie soundtracks, in which a sequence of two complex tones can be perceived as either rising or falling in pitch depending on the context in which they are presented. Convincing single-neuron data and analyses are presented to show that correlates of these pitch-direction changes are found in the ferret primary auditory cortex. While these findings provide an interesting link between cortical activity and perception, the manuscript could be clearer on the wider implications of the failure of traditional decoding models to account for these results.

Reviewed by eLife

Prolonged Pain Reliably Slows Peak Alpha Frequency by Reducing Fast Alpha Power

1. Andrew J Furman
2. Mariya Prokhorenko
3. Michael L Keaser
4. Jing Zhang
5. Shuo Chen
6. Ali Mazaheri
7. David A Seminowicz

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents valuable findings on changes in neuronal alpha activity elicited by prolonged pain in healthy human participants. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors, however, is incomplete and would benefit from clarifications of analytical strategies, additional statistical analyses, and shaping of the interpretations. With the methodological and interpretative parts strengthened, the work will be of interest to neuroscientists investigating the brain mechanisms of pain to identify new approaches to pain treatment

Reviewed by eLife

Distinct gradients of cortical architecture capture visual representations and behavior across the lifespan

1. Xiayu Chen
2. Xingyu Liu
3. Patricia Maria Hoyos
4. Edan Daniel Hertz
5. Jewelia K Yao
6. Zonglei Zhen
7. Jesse Gomez

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides a valuable perspective on visual cortex architecture by identifying two cortical gradients that change across the lifespan and have distinct functional and structural features. The first gradient captures well-mapped variations in cortical thickness and myelination markers from early sensory to higher-order cortex, while the second gradient shows divergence in these measures with a more localized structure, notably predicting a previously unknown cluster of visual field maps in the anterior temporal lobe. The large-scale lifespan data are compelling, but the evidence overall is incomplete with key questions around methodical checks and implementation, the standard of evidence for the new visual maps, and how the gradient model relates to sharp tissue boundaries parcellating the cortex.

Reviewed by eLife

Deciphering the nanoscale architecture of presynaptic actin using a micropatterned presynapse-on-glass model

1. Sofia Tumminia
2. Louisa Mezache
3. Theresa Wiesner
4. Benoit Vianay
5. Manuel Théry
6. Marie-Jeanne Papandréou
7. Christophe Leterrier

Reviewed by preLights

Brain state and cortical layer-specific mechanisms underlying perception at threshold

1. Mitchell P Morton
2. Sachira Denagamage
3. Isabel J Blume
4. John H Reynolds
5. Monika P Jadi
6. Anirvan S Nandy

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This useful study by Nandy and colleagues examined relationships between behavioral state, neural activity in cortical area V4, and trial-by-trial variability in the ability to detect weak visual stimuli. They present solid evidence indicating that certain changes in arousal and eye-position stability, along with patterns of synchrony in the activity of neurons in different layers of V4, can show modest correspondences to changes in the ability to correctly detect a stimulus. These findings are likely to be of interest to those who seek a deeper understanding of circuit mechanisms that underlie perception.

Reviewed by eLife

Scale matters: Large language models with billions (rather than millions) of parameters better match neural representations of natural language

1. Zhuoqiao Hong
2. Haocheng Wang
3. Zaid Zada
4. Harshvardhan Gazula
5. David Turner
6. Bobbi Aubrey
7. Leonard Niekerken
8. Werner Doyle
9. Sasha Devore
10. Patricia Dugan
11. Daniel Friedman
12. Orrin Devinsky
13. Adeen Flinker
14. Uri Hasson
15. Samuel A Nastase
16. Ariel Goldstein

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study investigates how the size of an LLM may influence its ability to model the human neural response to language recorded by ECoG. Overall, solid evidence is provided that larger language models can better predict the human ECoG response. Further discussion would be beneficial as to how the results can inform us about the brain or LLMs, especially about the new message that can be learned from this ECoG study beyond previous fMRI studies on the same topic. This study will be of interest to both neuroscientists and psychologists who work on language comprehension and computer scientists working on LLMs.

Reviewed by eLife