Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Sabine Krabbe describes a 1993 study of classical conditioning in the honeybee that provided early insights into the mechanisms of predictive learning.
In this Journal Club, Izumi Fukunaga discusses John Hopfield’s 1995 paper, which proposed a mechanism by which a continuously variable sensory stimulus can be transformed into a timing-based code.
The detection, discrimination and categorization of odours are essential for survival across the animal kingdom. In this Review, Datta and co-workers describe and compare the neural circuits that mediate the processing of olfactory information and the key principles of olfactory coding in insects and mammals.
Slowing neurodegeneration is the most pressing clinical need for multiple sclerosis (MS). In this Review, Woo, Engler and Friese provide a neuron-centric view on inflammation-induced neurodegeneration in MS and discuss key pathways and molecules that can be therapeutically targeted.
At early developmental stages, spontaneous activity in the mammalian cortex is characterized by the occurrence of highly synchronous network events. Portera-Cailliau and colleagues describe these activity patterns, their underlying mechanisms and function, and their transition to the desynchronized activity observed in adult individuals.
A clinically viable speech neuroprosthesis could restore natural speech to individuals with vocal-tract paralysis. In this Review, Silva et al. discuss rapid progress in neural interfaces and computational algorithms for decoding speech from cortical activity and propose evaluation metrics to help standardize speech neuroprostheses.
The location-specific firing of hippocampal place cells changes when an animal enters a new environment, a phenomenon known as ‘remapping’. In this Perspective, André A. Fenton challenges standard models of place cell remapping and proposes a key role for the ‘re-registration’ of internally organized place cell population dynamics in the encoding of distinct environments.
The main direction of motor skill-specific information between rat primary motor cortex and dorsolateral striatum is shown to switch from cortex-predominant before learning to striatum-predominant after learning.
Many cognitive functions rely on the ability to link distinct but related memories, while retaining the capacity to recall the individual details of the linked memories. Inokuchi and colleagues describe evidence that memory linking involves engram overlap and discuss the mechanisms that regulate this process.
The developmental colonization of the brain by microglial progenitors and establishment of microglial cell identity set the stage for microglial function in the adult. Barry-Carroll and Gomez-Nicola describe the mechanisms that regulate the development of microglia, including their origins, infiltration and colonization of the brain, proliferation and fate determination.
Many brain areas support complex language processing behaviours. In this Review, Fedorenko et al. disentangle the ‘core’ language system as functionally distinct from the perceptual and motor brain areas and knowledge and reasoning systems it closely interacts with during language comprehension and production.
Parkinson disease (PD) has been linked to dysfunction in a number of key intracellular signalling pathways that contribute to disease pathology. Coukos and Krainc describe the physiological functions of a selection of PD-linked proteins and their convergent effects on mitochondrial, lysosomal and synaptic dysfunction in PD.