Cognitive neuroscience articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    In familiar environments, humans automatically anticipate the sensory consequences of their motor actions. Here, the authors show how action-based predictions arise from interactions between the hippocampus and visual cortex, and how these interactions strengthen and weaken over time.

    • Nicholas C. Hindy
    • , Emily W. Avery
    •  & Nicholas B. Turk-Browne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In rodents, cells in the medial entorhinal cortex and subiculum are known to encode the allocentric direction to nearby walls and boundaries. Here, using fMRI the authors show that this is also true in humans, with allocentric boundary direction being encoded in posterior entorhinal cortex and subiculum.

    • J. P. Shine
    • , J. P. Valdés-Herrera
    •  & T. Wolbers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The effect of spontaneous variations in prestimulus neural activity on subsequent perception is incompletely understood. Here, using MEG, the authors identify two distinct neural processes that can influence object recognition in different ways.

    • Ella Podvalny
    • , Matthew W. Flounders
    •  & Biyu J. He

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether marmosets can exhibit complex motor tasks in controlled experimental designs has not yet been demonstrated. Here, the authors show that marmoset monkeys can be trained to call on command in controlled operant conditioning tasks.

    • Thomas Pomberger
    • , Cristina Risueno-Segovia
    •  & Steffen R. Hage

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Math and reading have shared cognitive components; here authors examined what are shared and dissociated neural substrates of these tasks. They find that dissociated regions and white matter sub-bundles within fascicles support adding and reading, suggesting parallel processing in the brain.

    • Mareike Grotheer
    • , Zonglei Zhen
    •  & Kalanit Grill-Spector

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Practice can improve the perception of stimuli used to achieve a task (perceptual learning). Here, the authors show in monkeys that perceptual learning can be produced even for irrelevant stimuli if the stimuli are paired with stimulation of a dopaminergic centre, the ventral tegmental area (VTA).

    • John T. Arsenault
    •  & Wim Vanduffel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Goal-directed movement is known to promote release of noradrenaline in the brain, and noradrenaline is known to enhance memory encoding. Here, the authors provide evidence that active movement, compared to action inhibition, boosts episodic memory encoding in humans via a noradrenergic mechanism.

    • Mar Yebra
    • , Ana Galarza-Vallejo
    •  & Bryan A. Strange

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is known that attention can modify the brain's representations of sensory stimuli to enhance features of importance. Here, the authors show that flexible readout of cortical representations is also required to explain the behavioral effects of attention.

    • Daniel Birman
    •  & Justin L. Gardner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    What is the function of color vision? Here, the authors show that when retinal mechanisms of color are impaired, memory has a paradoxical impact on color appearance that is selective for faces, providing evidence that color contributes to face encoding and social communication.

    • Maryam Hasantash
    • , Rosa Lafer-Sousa
    •  & Bevil R. Conway

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Qualitative psychological principles are commonly utilized to influence the choices that people make. Can this goal be achieved more efficiently by using quantitative models of choice? Here, we launch an academic competition to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches.

    • Ohad Dan
    •  & Yonatan Loewenstein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The hippocampus represents an allocentric map of space, however, motor movements used for navigation are defined in an egocentric framework. Here, the authors report that dorsomedial striatal neurons exhibit an egocentric representation of the boundaries in the environment.

    • James R. Hinman
    • , G. William Chapman
    •  & Michael E. Hasselmo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many natural behaviours involve tracking of a target in space. Here, the authors describe a task to assess this behaviour in mice and use in vivo electrophysiology, calcium imaging, optogenetics, and chemogenetics to investigate the role of the striatum in target pursuit.

    • Namsoo Kim
    • , Haofang E. Li
    •  & Henry H. Yin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) can modulate human brain activity, but the extent of the cortical area activated by TMS is unclear. Here, the authors show that TMS affects monkey single neuron activity in an area less than 2 mm diameter, while TMS-induced activity and task-related activity do not summate.

    • Maria C. Romero
    • , Marco Davare
    •  & Peter Janssen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In order to make optimal choices, it is adaptive for the brain to build a model of the world to enable predictions about likely later events. Here, the authors show that activity across learning in the orbitofrontal cortex comes to represent expected states, up to 30 s in the future.

    • G. Elliott Wimmer
    •  & Christian Büchel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    NREM sleep in rodents is characterized by internal dynamics in the form of UP/DOWN states in the neocortex and SWRs in the hippocampus. Here, the authors report that a mean field model with excitable dynamics captures the transition probabilities between these states from rodent sleep data.

    • Daniel Levenstein
    • , György Buzsáki
    •  & John Rinzel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Our perception of a speech sound tends to remain stable despite variation in people’s vocal characteristics. Here, by measuring neural activity as people listened to speech from different voices, the authors provide evidence for speaker normalization processes in the human auditory cortex.

    • Matthias J. Sjerps
    • , Neal P. Fox
    •  & Edward F. Chang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Place cells are neurons in the hippocampus which encode an animal’s location in space. Here, in mice, the authors show that place cell activity is also modulated by the heading-direction of the animal relative to a particular “reference point” that can be either within or outside their enclosure.

    • P. E. Jercog
    • , Y. Ahmadian
    •  & E. R. Kandel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An individual’s pattern of resting state brain connectivity, as measured with fMRI, has been shown to predict cognitive and behavioral traits. Here, the authors show that different traits are predicted by different time-scales of resting state activity (dynamic vs. static).

    • Raphaël Liégeois
    • , Jingwei Li
    •  & B. T. Thomas Yeo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social life requires us to store information about each person’s unique disposition. Here, the authors show that the brain represents people as the sums of the mental states that those people are believed to experience.

    • Mark A. Thornton
    • , Miriam E. Weaverdyck
    •  & Diana I. Tamir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We make decisions with varying degrees of confidence and, if our confidence in a decision falls, we may change our mind. Here, the authors present a neuronal circuit model to account for how change of mind occurs under particular low-confidence conditions.

    • Nadim A. A. Atiya
    • , Iñaki Rañó
    •  & KongFatt Wong-Lin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People vividly simulate prospective events and experience the anticipated affect—processes supported by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here, the authors show that these mere simulations change real-life attitudes, via a value transfer between environmental representations in the vmPFC.

    • Roland G. Benoit
    • , Philipp C. Paulus
    •  & Daniel L. Schacter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People differ in their current levels of understanding of many complex concepts. Here, the authors show using fMRI that brain activity during a task that requires concept knowledge can be used to compute a ‘neural score’ of the participant’s understanding.

    • Joshua S. Cetron
    • , Andrew C. Connolly
    •  & David J. M. Kraemer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The default mode network (DMN) is a core brain network in humans. Here, the authors show that marmoset primates also possess a DMN-like network but, unlike in the human DMN, dlPFC is a more prominent node than mPFC, suggesting mPFC is more developed in humans than in other primates.

    • Cirong Liu
    • , Cecil Chern-Chyi Yen
    •  & Afonso C. Silva

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Game theory typically models strategic human behavior using scenarios with decision constraints that poorly represent real-world social interactions. Here, the authors show it is possible to model dynamic, real-world strategic interactions using Bayesian and reinforcement learning principles.

    • Kelsey R. McDonald
    • , William F. Broderick
    •  & John M. Pearson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is not clear to what degree activity in dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) reflects perceptual-deliberation versus action-selection aspects of decision-making. Here, the authors report that monkey PMd neurons do not express correlates of the perceptual decision independently of the action choices.

    • Megan Wang
    • , Christéva Montanède
    •  & John F. Kalaska

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Santiago Herce Castañón and colleagues show that people are blind to mental errors that arise when combining multiple pieces of discordant information. This blindness helps explain why cognitive judgements often are suboptimal.

    • Santiago Herce Castañón
    • , Rani Moran
    •  & Christopher Summerfield

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans are often inconsistent when choosing between alternatives, but the neural basis of deviations from economic rationality is unclear. Here, the authors show that irrational choices arise in the same brain regions responsible for value computation, implying that brain ‘noise’ may underlie inconsistency.

    • Vered Kurtz-David
    • , Dotan Persitz
    •  & Dino J. Levy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The hippocampus is involved both in episodic memory recall and scene processing. Here, the authors show that hippocampal neurons first process scene cues before coordinating memory-guided pattern completion in adjacent entorhinal cortex.

    • Bernhard P. Staresina
    • , Thomas P. Reber
    •  & Florian Mormann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors show that individuals apply different ‘moral strategies’ in interpersonal decision-making. These strategies are linked to distinct patterns of neural activity, even when they produce the same choice outcomes, illuminating how distinct moral principles can guide social behavior.

    • Jeroen M. van Baar
    • , Luke J. Chang
    •  & Alan G. Sanfey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many functions of the human brain are lateralised i.e. associated more strongly with either the left or the right hemisphere of the brain. Here, the authors report the first complete map of functional asymmetries in the human brain, and its relationship with structural inter-hemispheric connectivity.

    • Vyacheslav R. Karolis
    • , Maurizio Corbetta
    •  & Michel Thiebaut de Schotten

  • 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

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