Computational neuroscience articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    The complex patterns of activity in motor cortex that control movements such as reach and grasp are dependent on both upstream neuronal activity in the thalamus and the current state of the cortex.

    • Britton A. Sauerbrei
    • , Jian-Zhong Guo
    •  & Adam W. Hantman

  • Article |

    Frontal cortex neurons can be grouped into categorical response types corresponding to particular decision variables, such as reward size, decision confidence, or value, and individual variables may be encoded in distinct projection populations; this suggests that, like  neurons in sensory cortex, frontal neurons form a sparse and overcomplete representation of important variables in the environment.

    • Junya Hirokawa
    • , Alexander Vaughan
    •  & Adam Kepecs

  • Article |

    Using mouse lines in which subsets of neurons are genetically labelled, the authors provide generalized anatomical rules for connections within and between the cortex and thalamus.

    • Julie A. Harris
    • , Stefan Mihalas
    •  & Hongkui Zeng

  • Article |

    Quantitative connectivity matrices (or connectomes) for both adult sexes of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are presented that encompass all connections from sensory input to end-organ output across the entire animal.

    • Steven J. Cook
    • , Travis A. Jarrell
    •  & Scott W. Emmons

  • Article |

    Temporal information that is useful for episodic memory is encoded across a wide range of timescales in the lateral entorhinal cortex, arising inherently from its representation of ongoing experience.

    • Albert Tsao
    • , Jørgen Sugar
    •  & Edvard I. Moser

  • Article |

    In mouse models of Parkinson’s disease and dyskinesia, striatal spiny projection neurons of the direct and indirect pathways have abnormal, imbalanced levels of spontaneous and locomotor-related activity, with the two different disease states characterized by opposite abnormalities.

    • Jones G. Parker
    • , Jesse D. Marshall
    •  & Mark J. Schnitzer

  • Article |

    Use of a head-mounted miniature microscope in awake, behaving mice reveals that neural ensembles in the basal and lateral amygdala encode associations between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli in a way that matches models of supervised learning.

    • Benjamin F. Grewe
    • , Jan Gründemann
    •  & Mark J. Schnitzer

  • Article |

    It has been proposed that language meaning is represented throughout the cerebral cortex in a distributed ‘semantic system’, but little is known about the details of this network; here, voxel-wise modelling of functional MRI data collected while subjects listened to natural stories is used to create a detailed atlas that maps representations of word meaning in the human brain.

    • Alexander G. Huth
    • , Wendy A. de Heer
    •  & Jack L. Gallant

  • Article |

    In mouse cortex, ‘preparatory’ activity that encodes future movements is remarkably robust against large-scale perturbations; this robustness is achieved by corrective signals from unperturbed parts of the network.

    • Nuo Li
    • , Kayvon Daie
    •  & Shaul Druckmann

  • Article |

    Two-photon calcium imaging reveals that the mouse retina contains more than 30 functionally distinct retinal ganglion cells, including some that have not been described before, exceeding current estimates and suggesting that the functional diversity of retinal ganglion cells may be much larger than previously thought.

    • Tom Baden
    • , Philipp Berens
    •  & Thomas Euler

  • Article |

    Neural sequences recorded from the vocal premotor area HVC in juvenile birds learning song ‘syllables’ show ‘prototype’ syllables forming early, with multiple new highly divergent neural sequences emerging from this precursor syllable as learning progresses.

    • Tatsuo S. Okubo
    • , Emily L. Mackevicius
    •  & Michale S. Fee

  • Letter |

    Recording from Purkinje cells in monkeys, this study found that the combined simple-spike responses of bursting and pausing Purkinje cells, but not either population alone, predicted the real-time speed of saccades; moreover, when Purkinje cells were organized according to their complex-spike field, the population responses encoded both speed and direction of the eye during saccades via a gain field.

    • David J. Herzfeld
    • , Yoshiko Kojima
    •  & Reza Shadmehr

  • Article |

    On the basis of neural firing rates a specific class of neuron is identified in the medial entorhinal cortex that linearly encodes information on running speed in a context-independent manner and that is distinct from other functionally specific entorhinal neurons.

    • Emilio Kropff
    • , James E. Carmichael
    •  & Edvard I. Moser

  • Letter |

    A new microendoscopic method reveals that hippocampal dendritic spines in the CA1 region undergo a complete turnover in less than six weeks in adult mice; this contrasts with the much greater stability of synapses in the neocortex and provides a physical basis for the fact that episodic memories are only retained by the mouse hippocampus for a few weeks.

    • Alessio Attardo
    • , James E. Fitzgerald
    •  & Mark J. Schnitzer

  • Article |

    Grid cells are cells of the brain’s internal map of space that fire when an animal is in a location corresponding to the vertices of a hexagonal grid pattern tiling the entire environment; how the pattern is mapped onto the external environment has remained a mystery, however, new studies in rat reveal that the axes of the grid are determined by the boundaries of the external environment and provide insight into the rotation of the grid axis in relation to these boundaries.

    • Tor Stensola
    • , Hanne Stensola
    •  & Edvard I. Moser

  • Letter |

    During learning, the new patterns of neural population activity that develop are constrained by the existing network structure so that certain patterns can be generated more readily than others.

    • Patrick T. Sadtler
    • , Kristin M. Quick
    •  & Aaron P. Batista

  • Letter |

    Simultaneous recordings from hippocampus and entorhinal cortex in rats show that as the animals learn odour guidance cues during their exploration of two-dimensional space in the laboratory, ensembles of coherently firing neurons emerge in both locations, with cortical–hippocampal oscillatory coupling occurring in a specific range of the beta-gamma frequency band.

    • Kei M. Igarashi
    • , Li Lu
    •  & Edvard I. Moser

  • Letter |

    Drosophila male courtship songs were thought to have a fixed structure with song repetition variations introduced unintentionally because of neural noise; this behavioural assay and computational modelling study instead reveals that males use fast changes in sensory information to actively pattern individual song sequences.

    • Philip Coen
    • , Jan Clemens
    •  & Mala Murthy

  • Article |

    When an animal is performing a cognitive task, individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex show a mixture of responses that is often difficult to decipher and interpret; here new computational methods to decode and extract rich sets of information from these neural responses are revealed and demonstrate how this mixed selectivity offers a computational advantage over specialized cells.

    • Mattia Rigotti
    • , Omri Barak
    •  & Stefano Fusi

  • Article |

    Recordings from rat grid cells, cells that are active at periodically spaced locations in the environment, show that they are organized into discrete modules that maintain distinct scale and orientation, and may respond independently to environmental changes.

    • Hanne Stensola
    • , Tor Stensola
    •  & Edvard I. Moser

  • News |

    Brain scans during sleep can decode visual content of dreams.

    • Mo Costandi

  • Technology Feature |

    The field of connectomics is pulling neuroscience into a speedy, high-throughput lane that is generating vast amounts of data.

    • Vivien Marx

  • Books & Arts |

    Maja Matarić, a computer scientist and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, makes robots that assist people with disabilities, children with autism and elderly people — a phenomenon explored in the film Robot and Frank (2012). On the eve of its release, she talks about the future of socially assistive machines.

    • Jascha Hoffman

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Michael M. Yartsev
    • , Menno P. Witter
    •  & Nachum Ulanovsky

  • Q&A |

    A postdoc’s development of a software code leads to numerous publications early in his career.

    • Virginia Gewin

  • News Feature |

    Henry Markram wants €1 billion to model the entire human brain. Sceptics don't think he should get it.

    • M. Mitchell Waldrop

  • News & Views |

    Grid cells confer a spatial impression of an animal's environment on the brain. Their firing patterns in a cave-dwelling bat reopen old questions about how they do this, and pose some compelling new ones. See Letter p.103

    • Laura Lee Colgin

  • News & Views |

    The idea that artificial neural networks could be based on molecular components is not new, but making such a system has been difficult. A network of four artificial neurons made from DNA has now been created. See Letter p.368

    • Anne Condon

  • Article |

    To date, various aspects of connectivity have been inferred from electron microscopy (EM) of synaptic contacts, light microscopy of axonal and dendritic arbors, and correlations in activity. However, until now it has not been possible to relate the complex structural wiring between neurons to the function of individual cells. Using a combination of functional imaging and three-dimensional serial EM reconstruction at unprecedented scale, two papers now describe the connectivity of single cells in the mouse visual system. This study examines how the selectivity of directionally selective retinal ganglion cells may arise from their asymmetry in the wiring with amacrine cells.

    • Kevin L. Briggman
    • , Moritz Helmstaedter
    •  & Winfried Denk

  • Books & Arts |

    Two books reach opposite verdicts on how the Internet affects us, find Daphne Bavelier and C. Shawn Green

    • Daphne Bavelier
    •  & C. Shawn Green

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