eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Hippocampal representations differentiate reactive and anticipatory responses during foraging under threat

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Chelsey C. Damphousse
   2. Olivia L. Calvin
   3. A. David Redish

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study investigates how the hippocampus distinguishes between reactive escape and anticipatory withdrawal during approach-avoidance conflict in rats performing a naturalistic decision-making task. Solid evidence supports the main finding that hippocampal neuronal representations differ during different types of defensive behaviors, although the evidence for some of the claims in the paper could be strengthened. The study will be of interest to researchers studying memory, navigation, and decision-making in the presence of competing rewards and threats.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Human decision-makers terminate evidence accumulation using flexible decision rules

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. I Kalburge
   2. A Dallstream
   3. K Josić
   4. ZP Kilpatrick
   5. L Ding
   6. JI Gold

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This work introduces a new paradigm for modeling decision-making under time pressure: rather than having to infer the evidence accumulated by the subjects, experimenters can directly measure it on a trial-by-trial basis. This is an important advance, as it has the potential to address questions that are off limits to the standard paradigm. The methodology and analyses are convincing, especially the ones that manipulate the reward structure. Additional analyses - in particular, a deeper comparison to an ideal observer model - would strengthen and broaden the conclusions.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Glutamate receptor composition at Drosophila neuromuscular junctions depends on developmental stage and muscle identity

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Anne Sustar
   2. Chengjie Qiu
   3. Yu Xiong
   4. Dion Dickman
   5. John C. Tuthill

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study provides important findings on the expression of glutamate receptor (GluR) subunits across developmental stages and muscle types in Drosophila. It shows that adult muscle differs in GluR composition from larval body wall muscles, which have been the focus of most past studies. The study, while convincing, could be strengthened by acknowledging that it relies on heterogeneous methods and the absence of positive signals to infer receptor loss, which limits confidence in some of its claims. The findings illuminate how Drosophila excites muscles in diverse tissue types at different life stages, and are of interest to researchers across neuroscience.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Male chickadees with better spatial cognition sire more extra-pair young

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Carrie L Branch
   2. Benjamin R Sonnenberg
   3. Joseph F Welklin
   4. Bronwyn G Butcher
   5. Virginia K Heinen
   6. Angela M Pitera
   7. Lauren M Benedict
   8. Eli S Bridge
   9. Irby J Lovette
   10. Michael S Webster
   11. Vladimir V Pravosudov

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study examines the benefits of spatial cognition in a wild population of mountain chickadees. Using robust genetic analyses and experimental design, the authors show with compelling evidence that females seeking out extra-pair copulations prefer males with strong spatial cognition, and that these males have a reproductive advantage over other males. This work is of broad interest to evolutionary and behavioural biologists.

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5. Moderate density of small mammalian herbivores facilitates livestock growth by improving vegetation composition in grasslands

   This article has 16 authors:

   1. Zhiwei Zhong
   2. Bingbo Ni
   3. Douglas Lawton
   4. Xiaofei Li
   5. Xiaona Zheng
   6. Huakun Zhou
   7. Junhu Su
   8. Wenjin Li
   9. Fujiang Hou
   10. Zhenggang Guo
   11. Quanmin Dong
   12. Shikui Dong
   13. Christopher R Dickman
   14. Jens-Christian Svenning
   15. Ying Gao
   16. Zhibin Zhang

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study provides evidence that plateau pikas, at moderate densities, can facilitate yak nutrition by suppressing a poisonous plant, offering a helpful perspective on reciprocal interactions between small mammal ecosystem engineers and large herbivores. The evidence is solid, supported by a manipulative field experiment and appropriate measurements of intermediary ecological processes, although some claims about density dependence, competition, and stress-gradient mechanisms are not fully supported by the experimental design. The work will be of interest to ecologists, conservation biologists, and rangeland managers, particularly those studying grassland herbivore interactions and livestock management on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Distinct sensorimotor encoding in tuft dendrites and somata associated with action, correction, and learning

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Jackson Scheib
   2. Zachary L Newman
   3. Jacob Gable
   4. Deano M Farinella
   5. Mitchell Head
   6. Savannah Bliese
   7. Benjamin Dougen
   8. Harishankar Jayakumar
   9. Sarah Young
   10. Nicole Miller
   11. Robert Al Khoury
   12. Huan Tran
   13. Tien Dinh
   14. Aaron Kerlin

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study reveals distinct representations of task-related information in the dendrites and somata of cortical neurons during sensorimotor learning and behavioral adaptation. The evidence is compelling, combining simultaneous imaging of dendritic and somatic activity during behavior to demonstrate compartment-specific encoding of sensory cues, motor actions, and corrective signals. The work will be of broad interest to neuroscientists studying dendritic computation, motor learning, and the cellular mechanisms underlying adaptive behavior.

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7. Ramping-up hippocampal ripples and their neocortical coupling support human visual short-term memory

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Jing Liu
   2. Xianhui He
   3. Can Yang
   4. Nikolai Axmacher
   5. Gui Xue
   6. Shaoming Zhang
   7. Ying Cai

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study provides solid novel evidence for a role of ripples in the hippocampus in visual short-term memory. The work is strong in employing state-of-the-art intracranial electrophysiology in epilepsy patients with multivariate pattern classifiers in the context of an elegant experiment, but several aspects of the theoretical framing, mechanistic interpretation, and analysis strategy are incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. The neuronal clock network in the polar key species Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba)

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Lukas Hüppe
   2. Nils Reinhard
   3. Annika Karl
   4. Valentina Kirsch
   5. Laura Wollny
   6. Amy Palmer
   7. Dirk Rieger
   8. Pingkalai R Senthilan
   9. Charlotte Helfrich-Förster

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This foundational and valuable study expands our understanding of circadian clock work in non-model taxa in wider environmental niches, using solid methods for protein and RNA detection to describe the expression pattern of PDH, cry2, and per in the central nervous system of Euphausia superba. While the anatomical annotation is extensive, support for the identification of the clock network is incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Layer-specific spatiotemporal dynamics of feedforward and feedback in human visual object perception

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Tony Carricarte
   2. Siying Xie
   3. Johannes Singer
   4. Robert Trampel
   5. Laurentius Huber
   6. Zejin Lu
   7. Tim C. Kietzmann
   8. Nikolaus Weiskopf
   9. Radoslaw M. Cichy

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study combines sub-millimeter 7T fMRI, EEG, representational similarity analysis, and deep neural network modeling to investigate layer-specific spatiotemporal dynamics underlying human object processing in early visual cortex and lateral occipital cortex; the authors report temporally distinct signatures in superficial layers of LOC that are interpreted as reflecting sequential feedforward and feedback processing during visual recognition. The multimodal methodological approach and empirical dataset are substantial and will be of broad interest to researchers in visual neuroscience, layer-fMRI methodology, and computational vision. However, the evidence supporting the central interpretation of interareal feedback remains incomplete, as the observed dynamics could also be explained by alternative mechanisms such as within-area recurrent processing, and there are additional concerns regarding several methodological and modeling choices underlying claims about increasing representational complexity at later time points. Overall, the study provides solid evidence for layer- and time-specific neural dynamics during object processing, while the interpretation of these signals as feedback-related remains provisional.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Betrayal is worse than loss during cooperation

    This article has 7 authors:

    1. Rumeng Tang
    2. Jingbin Tan
    3. Yi Gao
    4. Chen Lin
    5. Jing Gan
    6. Xiaowei Ding
    7. Dingguo Gao

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This valuable study examines whether reduced cooperation is driven by betrayal aversion beyond nonsocial loss aversion, using matched social and nonsocial risky decision-making tasks combined with computational modeling and EEG. The authors provide solid empirical evidence that social risk is processed differently from matched nonsocial risk, offering a meaningful contribution to the study of cooperation and decision-making under uncertainty. However, further justification of the computational modeling approach would strengthen some of the conclusions. This work will be of interest to researchers studying social decision-making, cooperation, trust, and the neural and computational mechanisms underlying risk and betrayal aversion.

    Reviewed by eLife