Cognitive neuroscience articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is believed that fast “ripple” oscillations in the hippocampus play a role in consolidation, a process by which memory traces are stabilized. Here, the authors show that ripples occuring during non-REM sleep trigger “replay” of brain activity associated with previously experienced stimuli.

    • Hui Zhang
    • , Juergen Fell
    •  & Nikolai Axmacher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The hippocampus is known to 'replay' experiences and memories during rest periods, but it is unclear how particular memories are prioritized for replay. Here, the authors show that information that is remembered less well is replayed more often, suggesting that weaker memories are selected for replay.

    • Anna C. Schapiro
    • , Elizabeth A. McDevitt
    •  & Kenneth A. Norman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attractor dynamics have been discovered in neural circuits, but it is not clear if they exist at the level of whole-brain activity. Here, the authors show that certain brain regions act as nodes in which many activity ‘streams’ converge, regardless of brain state. These regions show distinctive gene expression.

    • Ibai Diez
    •  & Jorge Sepulcre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brain function alterations in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders remain poorly understood. Here, the authors discover that increased neural connectivity in the cerebello-thalamo-cortical circuitry predicts psychosis in those at high risk, and is present in people with schizophrenia.

    • Hengyi Cao
    • , Oliver Y. Chén
    •  & Tyrone D. Cannon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural mechanisms underlying the suppression of fMRI responses to repeated stimuli are under debate. Here, the authors compare computational models to show that only a local scaling model can fit univariate and multivariate fMRI repetition effects across two paradigms and multiple brain regions.

    • Arjen Alink
    • , Hunar Abdulrahman
    •  & Richard N. Henson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual search requires recognizing an object “invariantly”, despite changes in its appearance. Here, the authors show that humans can efficiently and invariantly search for objects in complex scenes and introduce a biologically-inspired zero-shot model that captures human eye movements during search.

    • Mengmi Zhang
    • , Jiashi Feng
    •  & Gabriel Kreiman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People vary in the extent to which they feel better after taking an inert, placebo, treatment, but the basis for individual placebo response is unclear. Here, the authors show how brain structural and functional variables, as well as personality traits, predict placebo response in those with chronic back pain.

    • Etienne Vachon-Presseau
    • , Sara E. Berger
    •  & A. Vania Apkarian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When needed, we can speed up our decisions at the expense of accuracy. Here, the authors employ a novel human electrophysiology paradigm to show that hastened decisions are implemented through multiple, fundamentally distinct neural process adjustments across the sensorimotor hierarchy.

    • Natalie A. Steinemann
    • , Redmond G. O’Connell
    •  & Simon P. Kelly

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Superior colliculus (SC) and frontal eye fields (FEF) contain visuo-motor maps but their contributions to selective attention are not fully understood. Here, the authors perform reversible inactivations of the SC or FEF and report that loss of SC activity has a more devastating effect on attention.

    • Anil Bollimunta
    • , Amarender R. Bogadhi
    •  & Richard J. Krauzlis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prefrontal neurons exhibit both transient and persistent firing in working memory tasks. Here the authors report that the intrinsic timescale of neuronal firing outside the task is predictive of the temporal dynamics of coding during working memory in three frontoparietal brain areas.

    • D. F. Wasmuht
    • , E. Spaak
    •  & M. G. Stokes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Working memory (WM) is represented in persistent activity of single neurons as well as a dynamic population code. Here, the authors find that neurons flexibly switch their coding according to current attention while those with stable resting activity maintain WM representations through dynamic activity patterns.

    • Sean E. Cavanagh
    • , John P. Towers
    •  & Steven W. Kennerley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The presence of opposite horizontal motion in the two eyes is a cue for perceiving motion-in-depth, but also leads to suppressed motion sensitivity. Here, the authors address this paradox and show that spatial and interocular integration mechanisms, distinct from the extraction of motion-in-depth, drive suppression.

    • Peter J. Kohler
    • , Wesley J. Meredith
    •  & Anthony M. Norcia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reverse correlation is a psychophysics technique used to infer sensory filter properties by measuring how changes in stimuli influence behavior. Here, the authors show that reverse correlation is shaped by both sensory and decision-making processes, and validate a method to partition their contributions.

    • Gouki Okazawa
    • , Long Sha
    •  & Roozbeh Kiani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When tracking a moving object, our eyes make smooth pursuit movements; however, tracking an imaginary object produces jerky saccadic eye movements. Here, the authors show that during lucid dreams, the eyes smoothly follow dreamed objects. In this respect, dream imagery is more similar to perception than imagination.

    • Stephen LaBerge
    • , Benjamin Baird
    •  & Philip G. Zimbardo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Educational attainment and schizophrenia have a negative phenotypic relationship but show positive genetic correlation. Here, the authors study genetic dependence between the two traits and find that multiple genes have pleiotropic effects on both without a systematic pattern of sign concordance.

    • V. Bansal
    • , M. Mitjans
    •  & P. D. Koellinger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cognitive impairment is a feature of many psychiatric diseases. Here the authors aimed to identify multimodal neuromarkers that can be used to quantify and predict cognitive performance in individuals with schizophrenia using three different features of MRI and three independent cohorts.

    • Jing Sui
    • , Shile Qi
    •  & Vince D. Calhoun

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Saccades have been extensively used to report choices in perceptual decision making studies yet little is known about the influence of covert decision-related processes on saccade metrics. Here, the authors demonstrate that saccade kinematics is a reliable tell about the degree of decision certainty.

    • Joshua A. Seideman
    • , Terrence R. Stanford
    •  & Emilio Salinas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Economists have observed that many people seem unwilling to save for the future. Here, the authors show that earning and saving are subject to a basic asymmetry in attentional choice, such that cues that are associated with saving are perceived as occurring later than cues associated with earning.

    • Kesong Hu
    • , Eve De Rosa
    •  & Adam K. Anderson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Data sharing is recognized as a way to promote scientific collaboration and reproducibility, but some are concerned over whether research based on shared data can achieve high impact. Here, the authors show that neuroimaging papers using shared data are no less likely to appear in top-ranked journals.

    • Michael P. Milham
    • , R. Cameron Craddock
    •  & Arno Klein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Decoding or predicting cognitive traits from brain activity is an exciting prospect. Here, the authors show that task-based functional connectivity better predicts intelligence-related measures than rest-based connectivity, suggesting that cognitive tasks amplify individual differences in trait-relevant circuitry.

    • Abigail S. Greene
    • , Siyuan Gao
    •  & R. Todd Constable

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attention reduces correlated variability in population activity, however the effect of fluctuations in attentional state has not been studied. Here, the authors report in a novel visual task that fluctuations in attentional allocation have a pronounced effect on correlated variability at longer timescales.

    • George H. Denfield
    • , Alexander S. Ecker
    •  & Andreas S. Tolias

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The precise role of PPC in transforming sensory signals to relevant actions is not yet clear. Here, the authors show that unlike V1, which is largely driven by visual input, PPC is strongly task-dependent and exhibits a mixture of stimulus and choice signals in a visual decision task.

    • Gerald N. Pho
    • , Michael J. Goard
    •  & Mriganka Sur

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Serotonin (5-HT) plays many important roles in reward, punishment, patience and beyond, and optogenetic stimulation of 5-HT neurons has not crisply parsed them. The authors report a novel analysis of a reward-based decision-making experiment, and show that 5-HT stimulation increases the learning rate, but only on a select subset of choices.

    • Kiyohito Iigaya
    • , Madalena S. Fonseca
    •  & Peter Dayan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Theta oscillations are implicated in memory formation. Here, the authors show that low-theta oscillations in the hippocampus are differentially modulated between each hemisphere, with oscillations in the left increasing when successfully learning object–location pairs and in the right during spatial navigation.

    • Jonathan Miller
    • , Andrew J. Watrous
    •  & Joshua Jacobs

  • Article
    | Open Access

    White matter properties correlate with cognitive performance in a number of domains. Here the authors show that altering a child’s educational environment though a targeted intervention program induces rapid, large-scale changes in the white matter, and that these changes track the learning process.

    • Elizabeth Huber
    • , Patrick M. Donnelly
    •  & Jason D. Yeatman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neuronal basis of spontaneous changes in conscious experience is unclear. Here, authors report nonselective medial frontal activity starting two seconds before a spontaneous change in visual perception, followed by selective medial temporal lobe activity, one second before the change.

    • Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv
    • , Liad Mudrik
    •  & Itzhak Fried

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Functional morphemes allow us to express details about objects, events, and their relationships. Here, authors show that inhibiting a small cortical area within left posterior superior temporal lobe selectively impairs the ability to produce functional morphemes but does not impair other linguistic abilities.

    • Daniel K. Lee
    • , Evelina Fedorenko
    •  & Ziv M. Williams

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fluctuations in mood are known to affect our decisions. Here the authors propose and validate a model of how mood fluctuations arise through a slow integration of positive and negative feedback and report the resulting key changes in brain activity that modulate our decision making.

    • Fabien Vinckier
    • , Lionel Rigoux
    •  & Mathias Pessiglione

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Trial and error learning requires the brain to generate expectations and match them to outcomes, yet whether this occurs for semantic learning is unclear. Here, authors show that the brain encodes the degree to which new factual information violates expectations, which in turn determines whether information is encoded in long-term memory.

    • Alex Pine
    • , Noa Sadeh
    •  & Avi Mendelsohn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perception relies on information integration but it is unclear how the brain decides which information to integrate and which to keep separate. Here, the authors develop and test a biologically inspired model of cue-integration, implicating a key role for GABAergic proscription in robust perception.

    • Reuben Rideaux
    •  & Andrew E. Welchman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anticipation helps to prioritise the processing of task-relevant sensory targets over irrelevant distractors. Here the authors analyse visual EEG responses and show that anticipation may do so by enhancing the neural representation of the target and by delaying the interference caused by distractors that follow closely in time.

    • Freek van Ede
    • , Sammi R. Chekroud
    •  & Anna C. Nobre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The functional connectivity of brain regions can be reflected in a shared molecular architecture. This cross-modal study demonstrates correspondence of spatial patterns of gene expression to limbic and somato/motor cortico-striatal networks in human and non-human primates.

    • Kevin M. Anderson
    • , Fenna M. Krienen
    •  & Avram J. Holmes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The unique contributions of different frontoparietal networks (FPNs) in cognition remains unclear. Here, authors use neuroadaptive Bayesian optimization to identify cognitive tasks that segregate dorsal and ventral FPNs and reveal complex many-to-many mappings between cognitive tasks and FPNs.

    • Romy Lorenz
    • , Ines R. Violante
    •  & Robert Leech

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Temporal changes in brain dynamics are linked with cognitive abilities, but neither their stability nor relationship to psychosis is clear. Here, authors describe the dynamic neural architecture in healthy controls and patients with psychosis and find that they are stable over time and can predict psychotic symptoms.

    • Jenna M. Reinen
    • , Oliver Y. Chén
    •  & Avram J. Holmes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Grouping stimuli into categories often depends on a subjective determination of category boundaries. Here the authors report a neuronal population in pre-supplementary motor area whose peak activity predicts the categorical decision boundary between long and short time intervals on a trial-by-trial basis.

    • Germán Mendoza
    • , Juan Carlos Méndez
    •  & Hugo Merchant

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though adults’ brains process the internal states of others’ bodies versus others’ minds in distinct brain regions, it is not clear when this functional dissociation emerges. Here, authors study 3–12 year olds and show that these networks are distinct by age 3 and become even more distinct with age.

    • Hilary Richardson
    • , Grace Lisandrelli
    •  & Rebecca Saxe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Saccades result in remapping the neural representation of a target object as well as its attentional modulation. Here the authors show that the trans-saccadic attentional shift is precisely synchronized with the saccade resulting in optimal maintenance of the locus of spatial attention.

    • Tao Yao
    • , Stefan Treue
    •  & B. Suresh Krishna

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Data sharing is an important component of reproducible research, but meaningful data sharing can be difficult. Here authors describe a new open source tool, AFQ-Browser, that builds an interactive website allowing visualization and exploratory data analysis of published diffusion MRI data.

    • Jason D. Yeatman
    • , Adam Richie-Halford
    •  & Ariel Rokem

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