Cognitive neuroscience articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conventional theory suggests that people’s confidence about a decision reflects their subjective probability that the decision was correct. By studying decisions with multiple alternatives, the authors show that confidence reports instead reflect the difference in probabilities between the chosen and the next-best alternative.

    • Hsin-Hung Li
    •  & Wei Ji Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Saccadic suppression is frequently attributed to active suppressive signals derived from eye movement commands. Here, the authors show that visual-only mechanisms starting in the retina can account for perceptual saccadic suppression properties without the need for motor-based suppression commands.

    • Saad Idrees
    • , Matthias P. Baumann
    •  & Ziad M. Hafed

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Authors develop an integrated wireless system to examine brain states in freely-moving monkeys. They show that neural population activity in prefrontal cortex covaries with natural behavioral dynamics. Active behavior is associated with elevated arousal and increases in spiking activity while reducing low-frequency synchrony within cortical populations.

    • Russell Milton
    • , Neda Shahidi
    •  & Valentin Dragoi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rewarded stimuli are better encoded in memory. Here, the authors show that the average accumulation of reward over consecutive trials provides an additive, non-linear (inverted U-shape) modulation of memory encoding, paralleled by a similar recruitment of dopaminergic memory circuitry.

    • Kristoffer Carl Aberg
    • , Emily Elizabeth Kramer
    •  & Sophie Schwartz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Feelings of confidence reflect the likelihood that decisions are correct. Here the authors show that confidence taps partially dissociable evidence from that used for perceptual decisions, and that, rather than passively monitoring, confidence controls the depth of sensory information processing.

    • Tarryn Balsdon
    • , Valentin Wyart
    •  & Pascal Mamassian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Adaptive adjustments in learning dynamics are accompanied by dynamic changes in a pattern of whole-brain functional connectivity characterized by integration between fronto-parietal and other networks. These dynamic functional connectivity changes also track individual differences in learning.

    • Chang-Hao Kao
    • , Ankit N. Khambhati
    •  & Joseph W. Kable

  • Article
    | Open Access

    EPO treatment improves cognition, but underlying mechanisms were unknown. Here the authors describe a regulatory loop in which brain networks challenged by cognitive tasks drift into functional hypoxia that drives—via neuronal EPO synthesis—neurodifferentiation and dendritic spine formation.

    • Debia Wakhloo
    • , Franziska Scharkowski
    •  & Hannelore Ehrenreich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors construct quantitative models of human brain activity evoked by 103 cognitive tasks and reveal the organization of diverse cognitive functions in the brain. Their model, which uses latent cognitive features, predicts brain activity and decodes tasks, even under novel task conditions.

    • Tomoya Nakai
    •  & Shinji Nishimoto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors use a combination of perceptual decision making in rats and computational modeling to explore the interplay of priors and sensory cues. They find that rats can learn to either alternate or repeat their actions based on reward likelihood and the influence of bias on their actions disappears after making an error.

    • Ainhoa Hermoso-Mendizabal
    • , Alexandre Hyafil
    •  & Jaime de la Rocha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    That attention is a rhythmic process has received abundant evidence. Here, the authors reveal the natural sampling rate of auditory and visual periodic temporal attention. Both are antagonistically modulated by overt motor activity, a result generalised in a dynamical model of coupled oscillators.

    • Arnaud Zalta
    • , Spase Petkoski
    •  & Benjamin Morillon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The prefrontal attention spotlight dynamically explores space at 7–12 Hz, enhancing sensory encoding and behavior, in the absence of eye movements. This alpha-clocked sampling of space is under top-down control and implements an alternation in exploration and exploitation of the visual environment.

    • Corentin Gaillard
    • , Sameh Ben Hadj Hassen
    •  & Suliann Ben Hamed

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the human dopamine system changes during adolescence is still unclear. Here, the authors combine PET and quantitative MRI measures to show that dopamine D2/D3 receptor availability decreases with age while presynaptic dopamine vesicular storage was developmentally stable by age 18

    • Bart Larsen
    • , Valur Olafsson
    •  & Beatriz Luna

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Voluntary action and free will have been associated with cortical activity, referred to as “the readiness potential” that precedes self-initiated actions by about 1 s. Here, the authors show that the involuntary and cyclic motor act of breathing is coupled with voluntary action and the readiness potential.

    • Hyeong-Dong Park
    • , Coline Barnoud
    •  & Olaf Blanke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It remains unclear whether the functional organization of the visual cortex is shaped by genetic or environmental factors. Using fMRI in twins (n = 424), these authors show that activation patterns in category-selective areas are heritable, and that the genetic effects in these areas are linked to structural properties of cortical tissue.

    • Nooshin Abbasi
    • , John Duncan
    •  & Reza Rajimehr

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuronal populations in the temporal cortex fire show increased activity in response to face stimuli. Here, the authors show using human intracranial recordings that face perception involves anatomically discrete but temporally distributed response profiles in the human ventral temporal cortex.

    • Jessica Schrouff
    • , Omri Raccah
    •  & Josef Parvizi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People often fail to perceive the second of two brief visual targets, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). Here the authors modelled behaviour and brain activity to show that the AB arises from short- and long-range interactions between representations of elementary visual features.

    • Matthew F. Tang
    • , Lucy Ford
    •  & Jason B. Mattingley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brain imaging studies suggest that specific, large-scale, cortical networks show antagonistic activity with one another. Here, the authors studied the dynamics of these networks using implanted electrodes in the human brain, revealing that the coordination of inter-network dynamics on fast time scales relates to fluctuations in attention.

    • Aaron Kucyi
    • , Amy Daitch
    •  & Josef Parvizi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Efficient learning is akin to goal-directed dimensionality reduction, in which relevant information is highlighted and irrelevant input is ignored. Here, the authors show that ventromedial prefrontal cortex uniquely supports such learning by compressing neural codes to represent goal-specific information.

    • Michael L. Mack
    • , Alison R. Preston
    •  & Bradley C. Love

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pavlovian and instrumentally driven actions often conflict when determining the best outcome. Here, the authors present an arbitration theory supported by human behavioral data where Pavlovian predictors drive action selection in an uncontrollable environment, while more flexible instrumental prediction dominates under conditions of high controllability.

    • Hayley M. Dorfman
    •  & Samuel J. Gershman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain dynamically arbitrates between two model-based and model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Here, the authors show that participants tended to increase model-based control in response to increasing task complexity, but resorted to model-free when both uncertainty and task complexity were high.

    • Dongjae Kim
    • , Geon Yeong Park
    •  & Sang Wan Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural mechanisms underlying feature based attention to targets in a cluttered scene are not well understood. Here, the authors show that inactivation of the ventral prearcuate region leads to deficits in picking out a target among many stimuli as well as eliminates the feature based modulation of responses of V4 neurons.

    • Narcisse P. Bichot
    • , Rui Xu
    •  & Robert Desimone

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spatial maps in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) have been proposed to map abstract conceptual knowledge. Rather than grounding abstract knowledge in a spatial map, the authors propose a general-purpose clustering algorithm that explains how both spatial (including place and grid cells) and higher-dimensional conceptual representations arise during learning.

    • Robert M. Mok
    •  & Bradley C. Love

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attention is known to enhance relevant information in our environment, yet its underlying neural computations remain unclear. Here, the authors provide evidence that the degree to which a neural population can normalize itself results in greater potential for attentional benefits.

    • Ilona M. Bloem
    •  & Sam Ling

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People can easily extract task-relevant gist features from visual scenes and hold those features in working memory. Here, the authors show that this gist information is gradually abstracted from posterior to anterior regions of the brain and stably represented at the anterior region.

    • Byung-Il Oh
    • , Yee-Joon Kim
    •  & Min-Suk Kang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The visual word form area (VWFA) is a brain region associated with written language, but it has also been linked to visuospatial attention. Here, the authors reveal distinct structural and functional circuits linking VWFA with language and attention networks, and demonstrate that these circuits separately predict language and attention abilities.

    • Lang Chen
    • , Demian Wassermann
    •  & Vinod Menon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fusiform face area and parahippocampal place area respond to face and scene stimuli respectively. Here, the authors show using fMRI that these brain areas are also preferentially activated by eye movements associated with looking at faces and scenes even when no images are shown.

    • Lihui Wang
    • , Florian Baumgartner
    •  & Stefan Pollmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electrical stimulation of the brain can have variable effects, perhaps because of individual differences in brain structure which produce differences in the electric fields. Here, the authors show that using functional and structural brain imaging along with electric field modeling can predict the effectiveness of stimulation.

    • Florian H. Kasten
    • , Katharina Duecker
    •  & Christoph S. Herrmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Because our immediate observations are often ambiguous, we must use the context (prior beliefs) to guide inference, but the context may also be uncertain. Here, the authors show that humans can accurately estimate the reliability of the context and combine it with sensory uncertainty to form their decisions and estimate confidence.

    • Philipp Schustek
    • , Alexandre Hyafil
    •  & Rubén Moreno-Bote

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eye‐tracking is a valuable tool in cognitive science for measuring how attention is directed during visual scene exploration. Here, the authors introduce a new, touchscreen-based method that accomplishes the same goal via tracking finger movements.

    • Guillaume Lio
    • , Roberta Fadda
    •  & Angela Sirigu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Interference from overlapping memories can cause forgetting. Here, the authors show using fMRI decoding approaches that spontaneous reactivation of older memories during new encoding leads to integration, and less interference, between overlapping items.

    • Avi J. H. Chanales
    • , Nicole M. Dudukovic
    •  & Brice A. Kuhl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural mechanisms for concurrently attending to multiple features in the visual stimuli are not well understood. Here, the authors show that the neural representations for two overlapping stimulus features alternate with each other at a ~4 Hz rhythm that was also observed in fluctuations in the task performance.

    • Ce Mo
    • , Junshi Lu
    •  & Fang Fang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We tend to be more trusting of people who we know to be honest. Here, the authors show using fMRI that honesty-based trustworthiness is represented in the posterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and intraparietal sulcus, and predicts subsequent trust decisions.

    • Gabriele Bellucci
    • , Felix Molter
    •  & Soyoung Q. Park

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Animals resolve uncertainty by seeking knowledge about the future. How the brain controls this is unclear. The authors show that a network including primate anterior cingulate cortex and basal ganglia encodes opportunities to gain information about uncertain rewards and mediates information seeking.

    • J. Kael White
    • , Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin
    •  & Ilya E. Monosov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In congenitally blind people, tactile stimuli can activate the occipital (visual) cortex. Here, the authors show using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that occipital activation can occur within 35 ms following tactile stimulation, suggesting the existence of a fast thalamocortical pathway for touch in congenitally blind humans.

    • Franziska Müller
    • , Guiomar Niso
    •  & Ron Kupers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Decision-making research has confounded the reward value of options with their goal-congruency, as the task goal was always to pick the most rewarding option. Here, authors separately asked participants to select the least rewarding of a set of options, revealing a dominant role for goal congruency.

    • Romy Frömer
    • , Carolyn K. Dean Wolf
    •  & Amitai Shenhav

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In order to perceive moving or changing objects, sensory information must be integrated over time. Here, using a visual sequential metacontrast paradigm, the authors show that integration occurs only when subsequent stimuli are presented within a discrete window of time after the initial stimulus.

    • Leila Drissi-Daoudi
    • , Adrien Doerig
    •  & Michael H. Herzog

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recording from monkey orbitofrontal cortex, the authors used composite reward bundles and found individual neuron and population responses that were suitable for economic choice. The responses followed behavioral indifference curves and predicted behavioral choices consistent with formalisms of Revealed Preference Theory.

    • Alexandre Pastor-Bernier
    • , Arkadiusz Stasiak
    •  & Wolfram Schultz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Several cortical association areas have rapidly expanded in size during human evolution, including elements of the central cognitive default mode network (DMN). Here, the authors show that genes highly divergent between humans and other primates (HAR genes) are particularly expressed in these brain regions.

    • Yongbin Wei
    • , Siemon C. de Lange
    •  & Martijn P. van den Heuvel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The extent to which brain structure and function are coupled remains a complex question. Here, the authors show that coupling strength between structural connectivity and functional activity can be quantified and reveals a cortical gradient spanning from lower-level sensory areas to high-level cognitive ones.

    • Maria Giulia Preti
    •  & Dimitri Van De Ville

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