Volume 23 Issue 1, January 2020

Humans and animals are drawn to others in an altered affective state, whether sad or happy. A study published in this issue of Nature Neuroscience shows that a specific population of interneurons in the brain is critical for discrimination of affective states.

This paper offers a primer on transcriptional enhancers in the CNS, using examples of enhancer regulation in the maturing brain and the role of non-coding variation in brain disorders to explain the concepts emerging from functional neurogenomics.

Graves et al. demonstrate that as the neurotransmitter dopamine cycles through the cytosol at release sites, it can be metabolized by a mitochondrial enzyme to help generate the energy necessary to sustain synaptic function.

Lau et al. find that α-synuclein strains initiate distinct diseases when injected into mice, which provides a potential molecular explanation for the clinical and pathological differences between Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders.

Cocaine-generated silent synapses dictate the encoding, consolidation, retrieval-induced destabilization and reconsolidation of cocaine memories, and these syapses can be targeted to reduce drug seeking and relapse.

Scheggia et al. show that a specific subpopulation of cortical neurons expressing somatostatin in the prefrontal cortex has a primary role in orchestrating the ability of mice to discriminate positive and negative affective states in others.

Cummings and Clem demonstrate that cue-related activation and plasticity of prefrontal interneurons cause disinhibition of a distributed brain network that underlies fear memory.

Walking requires continual integrated information about the dynamic internal and external environment. This study reveals a pathway whereby the somatosensory cortex directly influences motor behavior based on integrated spatiotemporal information.

Dragomir et al. use a new decision-making assay in larval zebrafish to show that fish modulate their behavior depending on stimulus strength. A whole-brain imaging functional screen reveals neurons that integrate sensory evidence over the course of seconds.

Bahl and Engert show that larval zebrafish can temporally integrate sensory information. The authors then use brain-wide functional imaging to search for, characterize and model brain areas that are well-suited to implement the underlying processes.

Gulli et al. record neurons in the monkey hippocampus during multiple tasks in a virtual reality environment and find that spatial coding is task-dependent. Their analyses reveal rich nonspatial sensory and mnemonic coding of task-related features.

Bonnen et al. find that representations of 3D motion in primate cortical neurons have an unexpected structure that is shaped by the projection of the world onto the retinae. They demonstrate a link between this structure and human perceptual errors.

Although Bayesian models provide good accounts of perceptual decisions, it is unclear how their components are represented in the brain. This paper addresses this question by showing that uncertainty decoded from visual cortex helps predict behavior.

Kappes et al. report a new confirmation bias mechanism. When faced with disagreement, a reduction in the neural sensitivity to the confidence of others is observed leading to a subsequent failure to use others’ confidence to alter one’s own.

By comparing neural responses to diverse visual stimuli measured with a standardized two-photon imaging pipeline, the authors reveal response specializations within the mouse visual cortex.