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When designing neurotechnologies to assist people with communication disabilities, neuroscientists and engineers must consider both the speaker’s perspective and the listeners’ ability to judge the voluntariness and accuracy of decoded communication. This is particularly important in personally significant communication contexts for which there are profound legal and societal implications.
After establishing a novel operant conditioning paradigm that enables mice to report their interoceptive hunger state (fasted or sated), the authors investigated the hypothalamic neural circuitry that underpins these internal states using optogenetics and chemogenetics.
Reactivation of CaMKII–CREB signalling in retinal ganglion cells following injury is neuroprotective and restored functional vision following excitotoxic damage.
Human pluripotent stem cell-derived in vitro models have potential as tools to study aspects of human brain development. Here, Heilshorn and colleagues review biomaterial-based approaches that may be integrated into these models in an effort to develop them further and better recapitulate neurodevelopmental processes.
How category-specific regions of cortex, or ‘domains’, in the primate ventral stream arise is unclear. In this Perspective, Arcaro and Livingstone present a ‘bottom-up’ model for the generation of these domains, whereby experience refines a domain-general architecture based on topographic maps of the sensory environment.
A neural manifold analysis reveals that the hippocampus encodes both spatial and learned abstract information from the environment in a conjoined cognitive map.
Many studies implicate a prefrontal–basal ganglia circuit in the control of action-stopping. Here, Ricci Hannah and Adam Aron provide an update of studies of this circuit, discuss its clinical relevance, and consider whether its action-stopping function applies in real-world scenarios, beyond the laboratory.
As has been shown for developing excitatory synapses, microglia regulate connectivity in developing inhibitory circuits via a complement- and GABAB1 receptor-dependent mechanism.
Mammalian skin contains an array of specialized structures that transform mechanical forces into electrical signals. Handler and Ginty provide a comprehensive overview of the features of the skin’s mechanosensory end organs and the neurons with which they associate and consider how their diverse properties contribute to the sense of touch.
The brain is particularly susceptible to injury after ischaemia; however, emerging evidence suggests that, under certain conditions, it may show more resilience. Daniele et al. review the effects of ischaemia on the brain and efforts to study and protect the post-ischaemic brain.