Computational neuroscience articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early vestibular pathways are thought to code sensory inputs regarding self-motion via changes in firing rate. Here, the authors record from both regular and irregular afferents in macaques, and find both irregular afferents and central neurons also represent self-motion via temporally precise spike timing.

    • Mohsen Jamali
    • , Maurice J. Chacron
    •  & Kathleen E. Cullen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Single neuron responses are highly complex and dynamic yet they are able to flexibly represent behaviour through their collective activity. Here the authors demonstrate that population activity patterns of motor cortex neurons are orthogonal during successive task epochs that are linked through a simple linear function.

    • Gamaleldin F. Elsayed
    • , Antonio H. Lara
    •  & John P. Cunningham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pain in a phantom limb after limb deafferentation may be due to maladaptive sensorimotor representation. Here the authors find that sensorimotor plasticity induced by BMI training with the phantom hand, contrary to expectation, increased pain while dissociating prosthetic movements from the phantom arm relieved the pain.

    • Takufumi Yanagisawa
    • , Ryohei Fukuma
    •  & Youichi Saitoh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cortical circuits receive simultaneous inputs from multiple pathways and are able to flexibly select the appropriate inputs for processing. Here the authors propose a network model in which dendritic branch-specific disinhibition established through synaptic plasticity achieves pathway-specific gating.

    • Guangyu Robert Yang
    • , John D. Murray
    •  & Xiao-Jing Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The influence of context on value-based choice is well established but the neural correlates associated with this remain poorly understood. Here the authors perform fMRI in human subjects and find that the hippocampus and ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra are associated with the degree of influence of context on choice behaviour.

    • Francesco Rigoli
    • , Karl J. Friston
    •  & Raymond J. Dolan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Complex motions can be achieved by chunking together simple movements at the cost of producing smooth, efficient trajectories. Here the authors apply a new algorithm to monkeys learning complex motor sequences and show that optimization initially occurs within small chunks that are later combined.

    • Pavan Ramkumar
    • , Daniel E. Acuna
    •  & Konrad P. Kording

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anatomical segmentation of high-resolution 3D microscopy datasets is necessary to map large samples at cellular resolution. Here the authors present a pipeline for automated mouse atlas propagation (aMAP) to segment fluorescence images of the adult mouse brain and validate it against human segmentations.

    • Christian J. Niedworok
    • , Alexander P. Y. Brown
    •  & Troy W. Margrie

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mothers advocate eating healthy foods while children like to eat tasty foods. Lim and colleagues demonstrate that children incorporate their mothers' food choices while deciding what to eat as well as provide the neural correlates of this decision making process.

    • Seung-Lark Lim
    • , J. Bradley C. Cherry
    •  & Amanda S. Bruce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Acute stress has broad physiological and behavioural consequences, yet the precise factors that generate stress responses are not known. Here, de Berker and colleagues demonstrate that acute stress responses dynamically track environmental uncertainty and predict ability to learn under uncertain threat.

    • Archy O. de Berker
    • , Robb B. Rutledge
    •  & Sven Bestmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large-scale, multimodal phenotypic characterisation is a valuable tool to explore brain function. Poldrack et al. collect and relate MRI, psychological, physiological, metabolic and gene expression data from a single human over an 18 month period, providing a rich resource for future studies.

    • Russell A. Poldrack
    • , Timothy O. Laumann
    •  & Jeanette A. Mumford

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The auditory cortex Te2 represents a key node for the assignment of the affective value to sensory stimuli in rodents. Using pharmacogenetic manipulations, this study shows that in Te2 there are neurons which respond to the emotional valence of sounds and their inactivation impairs emotional memories retrieval.

    • Anna Grosso
    • , Marco Cambiaghi
    •  & Benedetto Sacchetti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior expectations shape neural processing in the brain and violations of these expectations can have a profound influence on learning. Here the authors demonstrate that such predictive coding mechanisms are already functional in the brains of 12-month-old infants.

    • Sid Kouider
    • , Bria Long
    •  & Sofie V. Gelskov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mathematical learning disabilities (MLD) affect up to 20% of children and are linked to poorer socioeconomic and health outcomes in adulthood. Here, Iuculano et al. show that tutoring induced functional changes in multiple brain systems underlie remediation of poor maths skills in children with MLD.

    • Teresa Iuculano
    • , Miriam Rosenberg-Lee
    •  & Vinod Menon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ability to continually adjust behavioural strategies is a hallmark of human cognition, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here the authors show that an insula-frontostriatal network mediates such flexible cognitive control by adaptively predicting changing control demands.

    • Jiefeng Jiang
    • , Jeffrey Beck
    •  & Tobias Egner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recent studies suggest that value-based choices involve communication between parietal and prefrontal cortices. Here the authors use a novel, non-invasive cortical manipulation technique to demonstrate a causal role for such communication in mediating accurate value-based, but not perceptual, choices.

    • Rafael Polanía
    • , Marius Moisa
    •  & Christian C. Ruff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurate motion perception depends on accurate estimation of retinal motion speed. Here, from natural image movies, the authors derive the optimal computational rules for estimating speed, and show that these computations predict both human speed discrimination performance and the tuning of speed-selective neurons.

    • Johannes Burge
    •  & Wilson S. Geisler

  • Article |

    In mammals, rapid identification of visual targets is facilitated by differences between the target and the surrounding visual scene. Here the authors demonstrate behavioural and neural correlates of visual pop-out in archer fish, suggesting it is a fundamental component of all vertebrate visual systems.

    • Mor Ben-Tov
    • , Opher Donchin
    •  & Ronen Segev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The human visual cortex includes areas with preference for various object categories. Here, Abboud et al. demonstrate using visual-to-music substitution, that the congenitally blind show a similar preference for numerals in the right inferior temporal cortex as sighted individuals, despite having no visual experience.

    • Sami Abboud
    • , Shachar Maidenbaum
    •  & Amir Amedi

  • Article |

    The human fusiform face area (FFA) plays a major role in face recognition. Ghuman et al.study the temporal dynamics of face information processing in the FFA and establish the timecourse of information processing as well as the processing stages that FFA contributes to when a face is first viewed.

    • Avniel Singh Ghuman
    • , Nicolas M. Brunet
    •  & R. Mark Richardson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In humans, choice between actions depends on the ability to compare action–outcome values. Here, the authors show that action–outcome values are compared on the basis of the relative advantage of a particular action over alternative actions, which takes place in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain.

    • Richard W. Morris
    • , Amir Dezfouli
    •  & Bernard W. Balleine

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human neuronal activity during cognitive processing is usually studied under experimental conditions but activity under natural conditions is poorly understood. Here the authors develop a method to accurately characterize the activity of the same neuronal population under both conditions.

    • Mohammad Dastjerdi
    • , Muge Ozker
    •  & Josef Parvizi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Detailed analysis of an animal’s posture and gait can provide a rich resource for behavioural studies. Kain et al. apply the technology of real-time motion capture to Drosophila, allowing automatic classification of the behaviours of flies spontaneously roaming on a tracker ball.

    • Jamey Kain
    • , Chris Stokes
    •  & Benjamin de Bivort

  • Article |

    The ability to delay gratification in childhood correlates with the ability to exert self-control in adulthood. Berman and colleagues re-examine individuals that were studied 40 years ago and find that the individuals who are able to exert a high level of self-control have more efficient neural networks.

    • Marc G. Berman
    • , Grigori Yourganov
    •  & John Jonides

  • Article
    | Open Access

    During rest, the different regions of the human brain still carry out complex interactions. In this study, a pairwise maximum entropy model is used to quantify the complexity of these interactions during rest, showing that the model is able to capture the structure of the resting-state human brain networks.

    • Takamitsu Watanabe
    • , Satoshi Hirose
    •  & Naoki Masuda

  • Article |

    Speech is encoded by the firing patterns of speech-controlling neurons in different regions of the brain, which Tankus and colleagues analyse in this study. They find highly specific encoding of vowels in medial–frontal neurons and nonspecific tuning in superior temporal gyrus neurons.

    • Ariel Tankus
    • , Itzhak Fried
    •  & Shy Shoham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reinforcement learning quantifies the change in behaviour in response to past experience. Using field goal attempt data from basketball, Neiman and Loewenstein demonstrate that even one failed or made attempt has an impact on subsequent attempts, showing that players overgeneralize from their most recent actions.

    • Tal Neiman
    •  & Yonatan Loewenstein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The paradigm of reservoir computing shows that, like the human brain, complex networks can perform efficient information processing. Here, a simple delay dynamical system is demonstrated that can efficiently perform computations capable of replacing a complex network in reservoir computing.

    • L. Appeltant
    • , M.C. Soriano
    •  & I. Fischer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drosophila melanogaster larvae demonstrate chemotaxis towards odours but their navigation mechanism is poorly understood. Using computer-vision tracking, Gomez-Marinet al.show that larvae ascend odour gradients using an active sampling strategy that is analogous to sniffing in vertebrates.

    • Alex Gomez-Marin
    • , Greg J. Stephens
    •  & Matthieu Louis

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