Cognitive neuroscience articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    There has been recent controversy over the validity of commonly-used software packages for functional MRI (fMRI) data analysis. Here, the authors compare the performance of three leading packages (AFNI, FSL, SPM) in terms of temporal autocorrelation modeling, a key statistical step in fMRI analysis.

    • Wiktor Olszowy
    • , John Aston
    •  & Guy B. Williams

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We can rapidly determine the gender, age and identity of a face, but the exact steps involved are unclear. Here, the authors show using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that gender and age are encoded in the brain before identity, and reveal the role of familiarity in the earliest stages of face processing.

    • Katharina Dobs
    • , Leyla Isik
    •  & Nancy Kanwisher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human confidence tracks current performance, but little is known about the formation of ‘global’ self-performance estimates over longer timescales. Here, the authors show that people use local confidence to form global estimates, but tend to underestimate their performance when feedback is absent.

    • Marion Rouault
    • , Peter Dayan
    •  & Stephen M. Fleming

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pavlovian conditioning involves model-free learning that associates predictive stimuli with their outcome value. Here, the authors present evidence for activation of OFC and striatum that is consistent with model based information during a pavlovian task with multiple stimuli that predict rewards.

    • Wolfgang M. Pauli
    • , Giovanni Gentile
    •  & John P. O’Doherty

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When learning about rewards and threats in the environment, animals often need to learn the value associated with conjunctions of features, not just individual features. Here, the authors show that the hippocampus forms conjunctive representations that are dissociable from individual feature components.

    • Ian C. Ballard
    • , Anthony D. Wagner
    •  & Samuel M. McClure

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large-scale brain activity arises from inter-areal interactions determined by the underlying connectivity. Here, the authors develop a whole-brain model based on connectivity data that captures activity patterns such as cortical waves and metastability, relating these to underlying brain anatomy.

    • James A. Roberts
    • , Leonardo L. Gollo
    •  & Michael Breakspear

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with symptoms ranging from sensory hypersensitivity to social difficulties. Here, the authors provide evidence of atypical connectivity transitions between sensory and higher-order cortical areas in people with ASD, which could underlie the diverse symptoms.

    • Seok-Jun Hong
    • , Reinder Vos de Wael
    •  & Boris C. Bernhardt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early neuropsychological studies suggested that different aspects of working memory (WM) are exclusively associated with specific brain areas. Here, the authors show, using machine-learning analysis of fMRI, how WM processes are dynamically coded by large-scale overlapping networks in the human brain.

    • Eyal Soreq
    • , Robert Leech
    •  & Adam Hampshire

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We can recognize an object from one of its features, e.g. hearing a bark leads us to think of a dog. Here, the authors show using fMRI that the brain combines bits of information into object representations, and that presenting a few features of an object activates representations of its other attributes.

    • Sasa L. Kivisaari
    • , Marijn van Vliet
    •  & Riitta Salmelin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuroimaging evidence implicates basal ganglia (BG) in social decision-making, yet causal evidence remains lacking. Here, the authors show that learning in strategic (but not non-strategic) games is spared in patients with BG damage, suggesting social decision making is not fully reliant on the BG.

    • Lusha Zhu
    • , Yaomin Jiang
    •  & Ming Hsu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electroencephalography (EEG) allows the measurement of electrical signals associated with brain activity, but it is unclear if EEG can accurately measure subcortical activity. Here, the authors show that source dynamics, reconstructed from scalp EEG, correlate with activity recorded from human thalamus and nucleus accumbens.

    • Martin Seeber
    • , Lucia-Manuela Cantonas
    •  & Christoph M. Michel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The reinforcement learning literature suggests decisions are based on a model-free system, operating retrospectively, and a model-based system, operating prospectively. Here, the authors show that a model-based retrospective inference of a reward’s cause, guides model-free credit-assignment.

    • Rani Moran
    • , Mehdi Keramati
    •  & Raymond J. Dolan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain primarily uses glucose to generate energy, but the relationship of neuronal activity to glucose utilization is not necessarily a simple linear one. Here, the authors introduce relative power (rPWR) and relative cost (rCST) as new metrics to quantify how brain activity relates to glucose consumption.

    • Ehsan Shokri-Kojori
    • , Dardo Tomasi
    •  & Nora D. Volkow

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Oxytocin is a hormone and neurotransmitter involved in reproductive and social behavior, but the role of oxytocin-related genes in the human brain remains unclear. Here, the authors map oxytocin pathway gene expression and show that it overlaps with brain regions involved in reward and emotional states.

    • Daniel S. Quintana
    • , Jaroslav Rokicki
    •  & Lars T. Westlye

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Place cells and grid cells are known to encode spatial information about an animal’s location relative to the surrounding environment. Here, the authors show that place cells predominantly encode environmental sensory inputs, while grid cell activity reflects a greater influence of physical motion.

    • Guifen Chen
    • , Yi Lu
    •  & Neil Burgess

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An unresolved problem in neuroscience is to determine the relevant timescale for understanding spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain. Here, the authors introduce a new framework to study the different timescales through binning the output of a generative model of neural activity.

    • Gustavo Deco
    • , Josephine Cruzat
    •  & Morten L. Kringelbach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The precise role of auditory cortical and thalamic projections in the representation of sound in the auditory striatum is not known. Here, the authors show that silencing thalamic inputs lowers the gain of sound-evoked responses while cortical inputs only affect the best frequency responses of striatal neurons.

    • Liang Chen
    • , Xinxing Wang
    •  & Qiaojie Xiong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Choices between goods often depend on the action costs, but the mechanisms underlying economic decisions under variable action cost are poorly understood. Here, the authors record from neurons in the monkey orbitofrontal cortex and show that decisions under variable action cost were made in a non-spatial representation.

    • Xinying Cai
    •  & Camillo Padoa-Schioppa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Optimal decision-making requires integrating expectations about rewards with beliefs about reward contingencies. Here, the authors show that these aspects of reward are encoded in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex then combined in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a process that guides choice biases characteristic of human decision-making.

    • Marion Rouault
    • , Jan Drugowitsch
    •  & Etienne Koechlin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) uses weak electrical currents, applied to the head, to modulate brain activity. Here, the authors show that contrary to previous assumptions, the effects of tACS on the brain may be mediated by its effect on peripheral nerves in the skin, not direct.

    • Boateng Asamoah
    • , Ahmad Khatoun
    •  & Myles Mc Laughlin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Alpha power is known to play an important role in cognition and perception, but we do not understand the link between alpha power and perceptual learning efficacy. Here, the authors use neurofeedback training to show that increased alpha power enhances learning while reduced alpha impedes learning.

    • Marion Brickwedde
    • , Marie C. Krüger
    •  & Hubert R. Dinse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    To explain the neural correlates of behavior and its variability, one must analyze single-trial population dynamics. Here, the authors develop a statistical method that extracts low-dimensional dynamics that explain behavior better than high-dimensional neural activity revealing unexpected structure.

    • Ziqiang Wei
    • , Hidehiko Inagaki
    •  & Shaul Druckmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In order to adjust expectations efficiently, prediction errors need to be associated with the features that gave rise to the unexpected outcome. Here, the authors show that neurons in anterior fronto-striatal networks encode prediction errors that are specific to feature values of different stimulus dimensions.

    • Mariann Oemisch
    • , Stephanie Westendorff
    •  & Thilo Womelsdorf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Blindsight refers to visual behaviours that are spared following lesions to the primary visual cortex and is thought to involve pulvinar circuits. Here, the authors report that selective inactivation of the ventral pulvinar or the superior colliculus leads to impairment in visually guided saccades in blindsight.

    • Masaharu Kinoshita
    • , Rikako Kato
    •  & Tadashi Isa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The frontal cortex is involved in cognitive control, e.g. cognitive flexibility and behavioral inhibition, but the roles of frontal subdivisions are unclear. Here, the authors used computational modelling of cognitive control task performance to map lesions responsible for impairments in specific cognitive operations.

    • Jan Gläscher
    • , Ralph Adolphs
    •  & Daniel Tranel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Motor learning is thought to be mostly procedural, but recent work has suggested that there is a strong cognitive component to it. Here, the authors show that humans use dissociable cognitive strategies, either caching successful responses or using a rule-based strategy, to solve a visuomotor learning task.

    • Samuel D. McDougle
    •  & Jordan A. Taylor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Molecular circuits implementing fold-change detection (FCD) allow cells to respond to fold-change in signals regardless of absolute levels. Here, the authors find that meaning, attention and saturation similarly form an FCD circuit and produce the observed dynamics of human behavior in creative search.

    • Yuval Hart
    • , Hagar Goldberg
    •  & Uri Alon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The pulvinar is involved in vision and attention, but its interactions with other brain regions are little-studied. Here, using fMRI the authors show that the human pulvinar has widespread functional coupling with cortical areas that reflects its intrinsic organization and the topographic layout of cortex.

    • Michael J. Arcaro
    • , Mark A. Pinsk
    •  & Sabine Kastner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Our eyes constantly follow objects we see, but do they also move in synchrony with auditory inputs? Here, the authors show that eyelid movements track the temporal structure of speech and other sound sequences, which could reflect a role of motor systems in temporal attention and sequence processing.

    • Peiqing Jin
    • , Jiajie Zou
    •  & Nai Ding

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How are abstract, imperceptible concepts such as ‘freedom’ represented in the brain? Here, the authors use fMRI in people born blind to compare the neural responses for abstract concepts, concrete concepts like ‘rainbow’ which in blind people lack sensory qualities, and concrete concepts sensorily accessible to the blind.

    • Ella Striem-Amit
    • , Xiaoying Wang
    •  & Alfonso Caramazza

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human eye movements when viewing scenes can reflect overt spatial attention. Here, O’Connell and Chun predict human eye movement patterns from BOLD responses to natural scenes. Linking brain activity, convolutional neural network (CNN) models, and eye movement behavior, they show that brain activity patterns and CNN models share representations that guide eye movements to scenes.

    • Thomas P. O’Connell
    •  & Marvin M. Chun

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Transcranial electrical stimulation techniques, such as tDCS and tACS, are popular tools for neuroscience and clinical therapy, but how low-intensity current might modulate brain activity remains unclear. In this review, the authors review the evidence on mechanisms of transcranial electrical stimulation.

    • Anli Liu
    • , Mihály Vöröslakos
    •  & György Buzsáki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The sense of ownership – of which objects belong to us and which to others - is an important part of our lives, but how the brain keeps track of ownership is poorly understood. Here, the authors show that specific brain areas are involved in ownership acquisition for the self, friends, and strangers.

    • Patricia L. Lockwood
    • , Marco K. Wittmann
    •  & Matthew F. S. Rushworth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forgetting is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom, but neuroscience is only beginning to address its mechanisms. This study shows that rats, like humans, actively forget memories that interfere with retrieval, and that this retrieval-induced forgetting requires the prefrontal cortex.

    • Pedro Bekinschtein
    • , Noelia V. Weisstaub
    •  & Michael C. Anderson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Inter-areal interaction has been shown to support various cognitive functions. Here, the authors report that neurons in area 36 flexibly synchronize their activity with different layers of area TE within different epochs of a visually cued recall task suggesting dynamic rerouting of information.

    • Masaki Takeda
    • , Toshiyuki Hirabayashi
    •  & Yasushi Miyashita

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans compensate for sensory noise by biasing sensory estimates toward prior expectations, as predicted by models of Bayesian inference. Here, the authors show that humans perform ‘late inference’ downstream of sensory processing to mitigate the effects of noisy internal mental computations.

    • Evan D. Remington
    • , Tiffany V. Parks
    •  & Mehrdad Jazayeri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attention affects stimulus response gain, but its impact without sensory drive is less known. Here, the authors show that attention is coded diversely in a population and is distinct between unstimulated and stimulated contexts, providing a contrast to normalized gain models of attention.

    • Adam C. Snyder
    • , Byron M. Yu
    •  & Matthew A. Smith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Our brains predict the likely sensory consequences of actions we take; one theory is that these sensory responses are suppressed, but another theory is that they are sharpened. Here, the authors show using fMRI evidence consistent with the sharpening account for sensory consequences of hand movements.

    • Daniel Yon
    • , Sam J. Gilbert
    •  & Clare Press

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Olfaction, the sense of smell, may have originally evolved to aid navigation in space, but there is no direct evidence of a link between olfaction and navigation in humans. Here the authors show that olfaction and spatial memory abilities are correlated and rely on similar brain regions in humans.

    • Louisa Dahmani
    • , Raihaan M. Patel
    •  & Véronique D. Bohbot

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In a dynamic environment old evidence could be outdated. Here, the authors investigate the ability of rats to integrate and discount evidence provided by auditory clicks to infer a hidden, dynamic, state of the world and model the consequence of sensory noise to explain the source of errors.

    • Alex T. Piet
    • , Ahmed El Hady
    •  & Carlos D. Brody

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parvalbumin and somatostatin expressing interneurons mediate lateral inhibition between cortical neurons. Here the authors report the mechanisms by which acetylcholine from the basal forebrain selectively augments lateral inhibition via Martinotti cells and show that this is conserved in humans.

    • Joshua Obermayer
    • , Tim S. Heistek
    •  & Huibert D. Mansvelder

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