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The ability to categorize objects depending on task demands is critical. A primate study finds that the prefrontal cortex signals to the parietal cortex during categorization, indicating an asymmetric, top-down interaction.
Gupta et al. report in this issue that, in Drosophila melanogaster, a dietary supplement of spermidine—a polyamine originally isolated from semen—protects against cognitive aging by acting through the autophagic pathway.
High-grade glioblastomas survive glucose-poor environments by becoming more stem cell–like. Increased glucose uptake by the transporter Glut3, a new biomarker of poor clinical outcome, drives this enhanced malignant progression.
People are able to form preferences for unfamiliar items, such as new books or foods, before experiencing them. A study in this issue of Nature Neuroscience finds that prospective evaluations of unfamiliar items can be based on stored neural representations of relevant, familiar items.
A study reveals that SIRPα is released from postsynaptic neurons to induce and mature their synaptic inputs, using CD47 as the presynaptic receptor. SIRPα is cleaved in an activity-dependent manner to act as retrograde signal.
TMEM16C has an unexpected role in regulating the activity and cell surface expression of sodium-activated potassium (SLACK) channels. By enhancing SLACK currents, TMEM16C indirectly inhibits pain signaling.
With evidence from model organisms and human population genetic analysis, two studies in this issue report discoveries that eukaryotic Top3β has RNA topoisomerase activity and, in a ribonucleoprotein complex with FMRP, is important for neurodevelopment and normal cognition.
A study reports that a metabolic measure of synaptic activity in the motor cortex becomes dissociated from neural firing rates after extensive practice in a behavioral task, suggesting an increase in efficacy of synaptic inputs.
Three studies in visual and auditory cortex show that intracortical excitatory inputs amplify incoming sensory signals, as their sensory tuning is closely matched to that arriving from the sensory thalamus.
Computational neuroscientists have started to shed light on how probabilistic representations and computations might be implemented in neural circuits, and here the authors review the application of these theories thus far. They further discuss the challenges that will emerge as researchers start expanding their use to more sophisticated, real-life computations.
A study shows that selective lesions of the orbital prefrontal cortex in macaques spare behavioral flexibility and emotional processing but impair a test of outcome expectation, suggesting that some psychiatric disorders ascribed to a disrupted orbital prefrontal cortex may instead be caused by more widespread dysfunction.
A feature of abusive alcohol drinking has been modeled successfully in experiments with rats. The experiments show that changes in NMDA signaling in specific neural circuits accompany the transition to aversion-resistant drinking.
A study now shows how brain-wide gain modulation, indexed by pupil diameter, shapes the structure of brain-wide neural interactions and, consequently, trial-and-error learning.
Chaotic networks produce rich temporal dynamics that could be useful for timing, but are extremely sensitive to perturbations. Work now shows that a learning rule for the weights of a chaotic recurrent network can stabilize time-varying activity patterns. This result can be used to train output units to produce generic timed responses.
Little is known about the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying acute and chronic itch. A new technique for silencing peripheral itch neurons defines two independent itch circuits that transmit signals to the CNS.
Chesi et al. use exome sequencing of trios consisting of subjects with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and their parents to find de novo variants in 25 genes, one of which is the chromatin regulator SS18L1 (CREST).
Modern theories of associative learning center on a prediction error. A study finds that artificial activation of dopamine neurons can substitute for missing reward prediction errors to rescue blocked learning.
The authors review recent work using functional connectivity in fMRI and discuss the issues that constrain the interpretation of these studies, as well as the potential uses of this analysis technique.
