Neural encoding articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    During rapid behavioural switches in flying bats, hippocampal neurons can rapidly switch their core computation to represent the relevant behavioural variables, supporting behavioural flexibility.

    • Ayelet Sarel
    • , Shaked Palgi
    •  & Nachum Ulanovsky

  • Article |

    Complementary types of retinal ganglion cell form mosaics with receptive fields that are farther apart than would be expected by chance, supporting the efficient coding of natural scenes.

    • Suva Roy
    • , Na Young Jun
    •  & Greg D. Field

  • Article |

    Both piriform cortex and its sensory inputs from the olfactory bulb represent chemical odour relationships, but cortex reshapes relational information inherited from the sensory periphery to enhance odour generalization and to reflect experience.

    • Stan L. Pashkovski
    • , Giuliano Iurilli
    •  & Sandeep Robert Datta

  • 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 |

    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 |

    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 |

    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

  • 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

  • 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 |

    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

  • Letter |

    Innate differences between male and female behaviours must be inscribed in their respective genomes, but how these encode distinct neuronal circuits remains largely unclear. Focusing on sex specific responses to the cVA pheromone in fruitflies, a chain of four successive neurons carrying olfactory signals down to motor centres has been identified, with all male to female anatomical differences lying downstream of a conserved sensory cell. The techniques developed should help others in the task of neuronal circuit mapping, which remains daunting even for the relatively simple fly brain.

    • Vanessa Ruta
    • , Sandeep Robert Datta
    •  & Richard Axel

  • Article |

    The central amygdala relies on inhibitory circuitry to encode fear memories, but how this information is acquired and expressed in these connections is unknown. Two new papers use a combination of cutting-edge technologies to reveal two distinct microcircuits within the central amygdala, one required for fear acquisition and the other critical for conditioned fear responses. Understanding this architecture provides a strong link between activity in a specific circuit and particular behavioural consequences.

    • Stephane Ciocchi
    • , Cyril Herry
    •  & Andreas Lüthi

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