Reviews & Analysis

The glial scar plays critical but divergent roles during regeneration of the mammalian CNS. Here the authors propose that in-depth analysis of the functionally heterogeneous populations of reactive glia within the scar is needed to fully understand the glial scar’s dual nature.

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.

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.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the behavioral process of learning to associate rewards with actions or objects. Conceptual and theoretical accounts of RL have focused on the striatum. However, recent data shows that the amygdala also plays an important role in RL.

A revolution is underway in cognitive neuroscience, where tools and techniques from computer science and the tech industry are helping to extract more meaningful cognitive signals from noisy and increasingly large fMRI datasets. In this paper, the authors review the cutting edge of such computational analyses and discuss future opportunities and challenges.