Volume 21 Issue 10, October 2020

In rodents, hypothalamic network oscillations regulate a brain–endocrine circuit that influences paternal care.

In female rats, social touch activates parvocellular oxytocin neurons, leading to activation of the larger population of magnocellular oxytocin neurons and facilitating sociability.

In mice, loss of the autism risk gene Nlgn3 impairs oxytocin signalling and alters social behaviour.

To mark the 20th anniversary of Nature Reviews Neuroscience, in this Viewpoint article we asked some of the researchers who have authored pieces published in the journal in recent years for their views on how the field, and their areas within it, have developed over the past two decades.

Sex steroid hormones such as the potent oestrogen 17β-oestradiol have only recently started to be acknowledged as important neuromodulators. Taxier, Gross and Frick review 17β-oestradiol signalling in the brain and its effects on different types of memory.

Although not electrically excitable, astrocytes display a complex repertoire of intracellular Ca²⁺ signalling. Semyanov, Henneberger and Agarwal describe experimental preparations and methods for studying Ca²⁺ activity in astrocytes, their limitations and the ongoing technical and conceptual challenges in the interpretation of astrocytic Ca²⁺ events and their spatio-temporal patterns.

Although inputs and outputs that carry social signals are anatomically restricted to distinct subnuclear regions of the amygdala, social behaviours are not. This fact may be explained by the operation of multidimensional processing in parallel with subcircuits of genetically identical neurons that serve specialized and functionally dissociable functions.

Reinforcement learning has been suggested to come in two flavours: model-free and model-based. In this Perspective, Collins and Cockburn explain why viewing reinforcement learning through this dichotomous lens is not always accurate or helpful, and suggest paths forward.