Articles in 2020

Major compelling questions about the functional role of the locus coeruleus nucleus that had been difficult to answer, given its remote location and diminutive size, have now become accessible via new neuroscience tools. In this Perspective, 14 investigators provide a historical context for recent discoveries and outline new vistas for investigation.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience was first published in October 2000. In this issue, we therefore mark the 20th anniversary of the journal.

Goal-directed primate behaviour is guided by abstract rules that group events and experiences into meaningful concepts. Here, Mansouri and colleagues discuss the distributed cortical and subcortical brain regions thought to underlie the formation, maintenance and implementation of abstract rules and propose a unified framework describing the neural architecture of rule-guided primate behaviour.

A resurgence in interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs has boosted research into their neurobiological and cognitive effects. Vollenweider and Preller review recent advances in the field and consider the implications of recent discoveries for the therapeutic use of psychedelics.

Glutamatergic neurons in the peri-locus coeruleus respond during ingestion of palatable food or drink and promote hedonic ingestion.

Scientific meetings are an opportunity to promote research and researchers. Anne-Marie M. Oswald and Srdjan Ostojic describe ways to promote diversity at the conference podium.

Sex steroid hormones such as the potent oestrogen 17β-oestradiol have only recently started to be acknowledged as important neuromodulators. Taxier, Gross and Frick review 17β-oestradiol signalling in the brain and its effects on different types of memory.

To mark the 20th anniversary of Nature Reviews Neuroscience, in this Viewpoint article we asked some of the researchers who have authored pieces published in the journal in recent years for their views on how the field, and their areas within it, have developed over the past two decades.

Progenitor cells in fetuses carrying Huntington disease-associated mutations show differences to controls, suggesting the disease may have a developmental component.

Reinforcement learning has been suggested to come in two flavours: model-free and model-based. In this Perspective, Collins and Cockburn explain why viewing reinforcement learning through this dichotomous lens is not always accurate or helpful, and suggest paths forward.

Although not electrically excitable, astrocytes display a complex repertoire of intracellular Ca²⁺ signalling. Semyanov, Henneberger and Agarwal describe experimental preparations and methods for studying Ca²⁺ activity in astrocytes, their limitations and the ongoing technical and conceptual challenges in the interpretation of astrocytic Ca²⁺ events and their spatio-temporal patterns.

In rodents, hypothalamic network oscillations regulate a brain–endocrine circuit that influences paternal care.

Although inputs and outputs that carry social signals are anatomically restricted to distinct subnuclear regions of the amygdala, social behaviours are not. This fact may be explained by the operation of multidimensional processing in parallel with subcircuits of genetically identical neurons that serve specialized and functionally dissociable functions.