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Sayar-Atasoy et al. monitored the activity of hypothalamic AgRP hunger neurons throughout the day and showed that these neurons anticipate meal time by integrating information about past circadian feeding experience with ongoing metabolic needs.
The authors show that neural activity and synaptic plasticity in the orbitofrontal cortex mediate multiple timescales of reinforcement learning (RL) for meta-RL, which parallels a form of meta-RL in artificial intelligence.
Nelson et al. report that the APOE-R136S mutation protects against APOE4-promoted Alzheimer’s disease pathologies, including phosphorylated Tau accumulation, neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration, in mouse and human neuron models.
The authors describe the connectivity, response profile and behavioral roles of two transcriptionally defined amygdala populations from separate embryonic lineages and show how responses of one population change with social experience.
This study applies topological analysis to hippocampal ripple waveforms, uncovering a low-dimensional continuum that encodes layer-specific synaptic input information. It also reveals how ripple waveforms vary during wakefulness, sleep and learning.
Experiments in human cortical organoid and mouse models of SYNGAP1 haploinsufficiency, which is associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), reveal altered cortical neurogenesis, suggesting that a non-synaptic mechanism contributes to the disorder.
McGinty and Lupkin show that value-based choices in monkeys are explained by multi-neuron activity patterns in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that are not evident in single cells. Identifying this neural–behavioral link sheds light on the OFC’s role in decision-making.
Radulescu et al. show that homeostatic mechanisms that reduce cortical activity following overstimulation are dysregulated later in life, such that overstimulation results in synaptic strengthening, elevated activity and cognitive impairment.
The study by Pallucchi et al. links the molecular identity of motoneuron and V2a interneuron subtypes to their function and uncovers orthogonal transcriptomic rules for their assembly into separate circuit modules controlling locomotor speed.
Chen et al. find that cerebellar Purkinje cells directly inhibit neurons in parabrachial nuclei that in turn influence many forebrain regions. This alternative output pathway could enable the cerebellum to regulate emotions, anxiety, aggression and affect.
What neurons encode when animals face a dangerous situation is unclear. Here, the authors show that the prefrontal cortex encodes both threat-specific information and a more general representation of the presence of danger.
Using direct intracranial recordings and modern speech AI models, Li and colleagues show representational and computational similarities between deep neural networks for self-supervised speech learning and the human auditory pathway.
The neuronal subtypes regulating the emotional component of learning and memory are not fully described. Here the authors provide a molecular atlas of the adult mouse amygdala and show the subsets of cells transcriptionally responsive to fear.