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In bat CA1, the authors found contextual time cells encoding spatial context and time, another population purely encoding elapsed time and social time cells encoding sequences aligned to another bat’s landing in a social imitation task.
Most spatial navigation studies assume a linear map of space. This study reports that neural representations of space follow non-linear hyperbolic coordinates. These representations also expand with experience along a maximally informative limit.
Sulaman et al. detail the neuronal underpinnings of sleep–wake states and discuss their intersection with hunger, fear and thermoregulatory circuits. They propose a de-arousal model for sleep initiation and highlight lingering questions in the field.
The use of field-standard approaches in neuroscience and psychology can exclude participants from research, biasing our understanding of brain–behavior relations. Here the authors discuss how we might address inequity in our scientific methodology.
Lee et al. show that the long-term storage of remote contextual memories involves progressive and synapse-specific strengthening of excitatory connections between memory engram neurons in the prefrontal cortex.
Despite rich behavioral evidence, it is unclear how the brain expands its behavior repertoire. By building theoretical models with a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, I show that the brain composes a behavior to solve a novel task by combining previously acquired skills and augmenting their variability.
Animals form cognitive maps of the world to guide behavior. This study shows that the lateral orbitofrontal cortex is essential for creating precise, outcome-specific cognitive maps during initial learning, but not for general map creation in itself.
Using mice and artificial deep reinforcement learning agents trained in the same task, it is discovered that composition of a novel behavior entails a simple arithmetic operation on action values of constituent subtasks and their stochastic policies.
The authors developed an optimized rabies tracing system for generating brain-wide monosynaptic input connectomes, and applied it in mouse visual cortex to reveal topographically organized subnetworks co-defined by visual areas, layers and cell classes.
Hádinger et al. found selective innervation of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) by frontal cortex L5 cells. The spike output of TRN provides a precise readout of the cortical population activity in thalamic regions connected to frontal cortex.
Tremblay, Testard et al. show that, in monkeys, spontaneous movements do not occlude neural coding of cognitive variables. However, movements predict upcoming decisions and partly explain neural activity, potentially confounding brain recording experiments.
Craving—the urge to use a drug or to eat—is a core feature of substance use disorders. Koban et al. present an fMRI-based and machine-learning-based neuromarker that predicts the intensity of drug and food craving and separates drug users from non-users.
Iron-laden microglia assume a disease-relevant, ferroptosis-associated signature and cause neurotoxicity. CRISPR screen uncovered regulators of ferroptosis in microglia. This ferroptosis–microglia–neurodegeneration axis could be targeted therapeutically.
What are the representations that enable diverse human cognition? The authors investigate cortical representations across 26 tasks and the conditions by which artificial neural network models reproduce these representations.
Brain images from the Chinese Human Connectome Project (CHCP) are now publicly available to facilitate transcultural and cross-ethnic brain–mind studies. Comparisons found reproducible brain parcellations but most differences were in language processing.
This article shows that reduced inhibitory tone in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex of obese mice impairs their ability to use the value of an outcome to guide behavior. This could explain why access to obesogenic food biases behavior toward eating beyond satiety.
Combining brain imaging, genetics and behavioral data, this study shows that distinct brainwide distributions of serotonin receptors explain the known division of serotonin effects on human impulsivity and aversive processing.
Leveraging RNA-targeting CRISPR–Cas13d technology, Morelli et al. engineered a novel therapeutic strategy that safely and effectively eliminates toxic expanded huntingtin RNA in multiple models of Huntington’s disease.
Alfonsa et al. show that wakefulness causes shifts in cortical EGABAA, weakening synaptic inhibition and resulting in markers of local sleep pressure, and identify Cl− regulation as a link between sleep–wake history, cortical activity and behavior.