eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Phasic oxygen dynamics confounds fast choline-sensitive biosensor signals in the brain of behaving rodents

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Ricardo M Santos
   2. Anton Sirota

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Trading mental effort for confidence in the metacognitive control of value-based decision-making

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Douglas G Lee
   2. Jean Daunizeau

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: This manuscript addresses a timely subject: the role of cognitive control (or mental effort) in value-based decision making. While there are plenty of models explaining value-based choice, and there is a growing number of computational accounts concerning effort-allocation, little theoretical work has been done to relate the two literatures. This manuscript contributes a novel and interesting step in this direction, by introducing a computational account of meta-control in value-based decision making. According to this account, meta-control can be described as a cost-benefit analysis that weighs the benefits of allocating mental effort against associated costs. The benefits of mental effort pertain to the integration of value-relevant information to form posterior beliefs about option values. Given a small set of parameters, as well as pre-choice value ratings and pre-choice uncertainty ratings as inputs to the model, it can predict relevant decision variables as outputs, such as choice accuracy, choice confidence, choice induced preference changes, response time and subjective effort ratings. The study fits the model to data from a behavioral experiment involving value-based decisions between food items. The resulting behavioral fits reproduce a number of predictions derived from the model. Finally, the article describes how the model relates to established accumulator models of decision-making.

     The (relatively simple) model is impressive in its apparent ability to reproduce qualitative patterns across diverse data including choices, RTs, choice confidence ratings, subjective effort, and choice-induced changes in relative preferences successfully. The model also appears well-motivated, well-reasoned, and well-formulated. While all reviewers agreed that the manuscript is of potential interest, they also all felt that a stronger case needs to be made for the explanatory power of the model, and that the model should be embedded more thoroughly in the existing literature on this topic.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Simulated poaching affects global connectivity and efficiency in social networks of African savanna elephants—An exemplar of how human disturbance impacts group-living species

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Maggie Wiśniewska
   2. Ivan Puga-Gonzalez
   3. Phyllis Lee
   4. Cynthia Moss
   5. Gareth Russell
   6. Simon Garnier
   7. Cédric Sueur

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: Your study used simulated elephant poaching to investigate the impact of selective individual removal on the functional resilience of animal social networks to human-induced disturbance. This topic is interesting and timely, because understanding how threatened animal populations are impacted by humans is of critical importance and requires more study -- especially for species/processes with limited real-world data, but with a potentially strong impact on ecosystem functioning. However, the reviewers unanimously agreed that the logic and assumptions underlying the study are problematic and, thus, limit the insights that can be drawn from the simulation results. They highlighted specifically that the network metrics used to infer functionality are not supported by field data on elephants, or indeed any other study systems. Please find more detailed comments from all three reviewers appended below.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. BAP1/ASXL complex modulation regulates epithelial-mesenchymal transition during trophoblast differentiation and invasion

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Vicente Perez-Garcia
   2. Georgia Lea
   3. Pablo Lopez-Jimenez
   4. Hanneke Okkenhaug
   5. Graham J Burton
   6. Ashley Moffett
   7. Margherita Y Turco
   8. Myriam Hemberger

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Fine-Tuning of Piezo1 Expression and Activity Ensures Efficient Myoblast Fusion during Skeletal Myogenesis

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Huascar Pedro Ortuste Quiroga
   2. Massimo Ganassi
   3. Shingo Yokoyama
   4. Kodai Nakamura
   5. Tomohiro Yamashita
   6. Daniel Raimbach
   7. Arisa Hagiwara
   8. Oscar Harrington
   9. Jodie Breach-Teji
   10. Atsushi Asakura
   11. Yoshiro Suzuki
   12. Makoto Tominaga
   13. Peter S. Zammit
   14. Katsumasa Goto

   Reviewed by eLife

6. De novo learning versus adaptation of continuous control in a manual tracking task

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Christopher S Yang
   2. Noah J Cowan
   3. Adrian M Haith

   Reviewed by eLife

7. LAP2alpha maintains a mobile and low assembly state of A-type lamins in the nuclear interior

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Nana Naetar
   2. Konstantina Georgiou
   3. Christian Knapp
   4. Irena Bronshtein
   5. Elisabeth Zier
   6. Petra Fichtinger
   7. Thomas Dechat
   8. Yuval Garini
   9. Roland Foisner

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: This work builds on prior studies by the Foisner group that investigated the function(s) of the soluble A-type lamin binding protein, LAP2a. One of their prior observations using antibody labeling was that there appeared to be a depletion of the nucleoplasmic pool of A-type lamins in cells lacking LAP2a. In this manuscript, the authors employ CRISPR-Cas9 editing to develop new tools to investigate the attributes specific to nucleoplasmic versus lamina-integrated A-type lamins. Using this new approach (and comparing it with their prior observations), the authors hit upon a new model in which LAP2a influences the conformational state of A-type lamins, which in turn influences its detection by a commonly used antibody. This technical detail explains the new realization that nucleoplasmic lamin A persists in LAP2a-null cells, albeit in a different state. The authors provide evidence that LAP2a antagonizes stable lamin A filament assembly, that is absence leads to stabilized intranuclear lamin A assemblies, and that telomere mobility is negatively influenced by loss of LAP2a in a manner depending on the presence of lamin A/C. The authors' work further identifies two pathways by which nucleoplasmic lamins emerge, namely by 1) initial localization to the lamina followed by relocalization to the nucleoplasm, and 2) from the pool of mitotic lamins which are not associated to the lamina.

     Overall there was enthusiasm for the study, with the reviewers stating their appreciation for the author's mechanistic approach to studying lamin assembly state and the use of complementary cell biology/microscopy and biochemical approaches. The rigor of the science was also lauded, including inclusion of, for example, genome editing quality control measures. Taken together the reviewers felt that the findings provided a new perspective on how LAP2a influences the state of A-type lamins. As the impact of lamins on nuclear organization is critical for nuclear functions and important for nuclear integrity, these results are fundamental for the understanding of both lamin A/C and LAP2a.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Value Certainty in Drift-Diffusion Models of Preferential Choice

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Douglas Lee
   2. Marius Usher

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: This study investigates how uncertainty about the values of choice alternatives affects decision-making from the perspective of drift-diffusion modeling. Both reviewers agree that this is an interesting question. The authors propose different candidate models for how uncertainty might affect the drift rate or the diffusion variance, and test these candidates on four food-preference datasets. The authors report that the best model is one in which the drift rate scales with the value of the options normalized by their respective uncertainties.

     Despite the relevance of the research question, both reviewers have found the contribution of the findings to existing knowledge to be not sufficiently strong and clear. Several empirical observations reported in the study are already well known, and several of the alternative models are known to be "strawmen" for researchers in value-based decision-making and drift-diffusion modeling. In particular, the reviewers have noted that is not surprising that a lower certainty alone cannot correspond to higher diffusion noise in a drift-diffusion model, and can thus be captured by a lower drift. They agreed, and further amplified in the consultation session amongst reviewers, that the precise computational way by which this drift modulation is implemented would need to be investigated much further. Furthermore, to increase the strength of the conclusions, the authors should explore in more detail the different classes of DDMs, and the ways in which value certainty could affect other parameters of the model than the ones considered in the manuscript.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. A new model of decision processing in instrumental learning tasks

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Steven Miletić
   2. Russell J Boag
   3. Anne C Trutti
   4. Niek Stevenson
   5. Birte U Forstmann
   6. Andrew Heathcote

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: This cognitive modeling study on a timely topic investigates the combination of reinforcement learning and decision-making for modeling choice and reaction-time data in sequential reinforcement problems (e.g., bandit tasks). The central claim of the paper is that the often-used combination of reinforcement learning with the drift-diffusion model (which decides based on the difference between option values) does not provide an adequate model of instrumental learning. Instead, the authors propose an "advantage racing" model which provides better fits to choice and reaction-time data in different variants of two-alternative forced-choice tasks. Furthermore, the authors emphasize that their advantage racing model allows for fitting decision problems with more than two alternatives - something which the standard drift-diffusion model cannot do. These findings can be of interest for researchers investigating learning and decision-making.

     The study asks an important question for understanding the interaction between reinforcement learning and decision-making, the methods appear sound, and the manuscript is clearly written. The superiority of the advantage racing model is key to the novelty of the study, which otherwise relies on a canonical task studied in several recent papers on the same issue. However, the reviewers feel that the framing of the study and its conclusions would require additional analyses and experiments to transform the manuscript from a modest quantitative improvement into a qualitative theoretical advance. In particular, as described in the paragraphs below, the authors should test how their advantage racing model fares in reinforcement problems with more than two alternatives. This is, from their own account throughout the paper, a situation where their model could show most clearly its superiority over standard drift-diffusion models used in the recent literature.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Basis of specificity for a conserved and promiscuous chromatin remodeling protein

    This article has 9 authors:

    1. Drake A Donovan
    2. Johnathan G Crandall
    3. Vi N Truong
    4. Abigail L Vaaler
    5. Thomas B Bailey
    6. Devin Dinwiddie
    7. Orion GB Banks
    8. Laura E McKnight
    9. Jeffrey N McKnight

    Reviewed by eLife