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The discovery of a circuit from the midcingulate cortex to the posterior insula that is essential for cortical sensitization sheds light on the plasticity mechanisms responsible for the transition from acute to chronic pain.
Physiological and optogenetic dissection of discrete locus coeruleus neuronal populations reveals a functional disassociation, with heterogeneous engagement of locus coeruleus neurons in either fear learning or extinction models.
Synaptic integration is critical for determining how information in the brain is encoded, stored and retrieved. The authors review roles for synaptic integrative mechanisms in the selection, generation and plasticity of spatially modulated firing, and in related temporal codes for representation of space.
In this Perspective, the authors propose that functional insights into generalist cortical computation may reside at the level of population patterns rather than functionally defined cell types. They then review results showing that medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) neurons exhibit substantial heterogeneity, suggesting MEC is a generalist circuit that computes diverse episodic states.
Cognitive maps are internal representations of large-scale navigable spaces. While they have been long studied in rodents, recent work in humans reveals new insights into how cognitive maps are encoded, anchored to environmental landmarks and used to plan routes. Similar neural mechanisms might be used to form ‘maps’ of nonphysical spaces.
Considerable progress has been made in understanding how the brain encodes our sense of direction. This Perspective considers the link between self-motion detection and navigation circuits and discusses future challenges for establishing the neural mechanisms responsible for sensing direction in both real-world and virtual-reality environments.
Moser, Moser and McNaughton provide a historical overview describing how ideas about integration of self-motion cues have shaped our understanding of spatial representation in hippocampal–entorhinal systems, from the discovery of place cells in the 1970s to contemporary studies of spatial coding in intermingled and interacting cell types within complex circuits.
Distinct processing of objects and space has been an organizing principle for studying higher-level vision and medial temporal lobe memory. Here Connor and Knierim discuss instead how spatial information, on both local and global scales, is deeply integrated into the ventral-temporal object-processing pathway in vision and memory.
The hippocampus serves a critical function in memory, navigation, and cognition. Nature Neuroscience asked John Lisman to lead a group of researchers in a dialog on shared and distinct viewpoints on the hippocampus.
Cerebellar right Crus I (RCrusI) has been implicated in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). RCrusI modulation altered RCrusI–inferior parietal lobule connectivity, and this connectivity was atypical in children with ASD and in a TscI mouse model of ASD. Inhibition of RCrusI in mice led to autism-related behaviors, and RCrusI activation rescued social impairments in TscI mice.
The authors show that PKC-δ-expressing neurons in the central amygdala, are essential for synaptic plasticity underlying learning in the lateral amygdala, as they convey information about unconditioned stimulus to the lateral amygdala as a teaching signal.
Suzuki et al. found that food valuation is related to beliefs about nutritive attributes. Functional MRI revealed these attribute codes in lateral orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting a mechanism by which value signals are constructed from constituent attributes.
The critical period of ocular dominance (OD) plasticity in the visual cortex is initiated by maturation of inhibition. The authors show that thalamic relay neurons in mouse dorsolateral geniculate nucleus also undergo OD plasticity. This process depends on thalamic inhibition and is required for consolidating the OD shift in visual cortex.
Animals must detect noxious stimuli to initiate protective behavior, but the evolutionary origin of nociceptive systems is poorly understood. The authors reveal a core function for TRPA1 in noxious heat transduction based on sensing H2O2 and ROS and demonstrate its conservation from planarians to humans.
Neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex (but not the frontal eye fields) appear to maintain working memory information when disrupted by a transient distractor, not by using an immutable persistent code but by morphing from one persistent code to another. This code-morphing may provide the lateral prefrontal cortex with cognitive flexibility.
Davis et al. report that fear memories can be critically regulated by parvalbumin-expressing interneurons in the basolateral amygdala. Silencing these interneurons following fear memory extinction caused a reemergence of fear expression that was accompanied by increased activation of fear-encoding neurons and fear-associated 3–6 Hz oscillations within a basolateral amygdala–prefrontal cortex circuit.
The authors show how predictive representations are useful for maximizing future reward, particularly in spatial domains. They develop a predictive-map model of hippocampal place cells and entorhinal grid cells that captures a wide variety of effects from human and rodent literature.
