Neural encoding articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether and how sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) accompany mental states that are less closely linked to events in the immediate environment are not fully understood. Here authors recorded SWRs from hippocampus of 10 epilepsy patients for up to 15 days with experience sampling. SWR rates showed circadian fluctuation and were associated with self-generated thoughts such as mind wandering.

    • Takamitsu Iwata
    • , Takufumi Yanagisawa
    •  & Haruhiko Kishima

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How neural ensembles encode information remains poorly understood. Here, the authors identify “offsembles”—neurons that are specifically inactivated by sensory stimuli—which, when combined with “onsemble” neurons that are turned on by the stimulus, provide enhanced encoding power to the cortex.

    • Jesús Pérez-Ortega
    • , Alejandro Akrouh
    •  & Rafael Yuste

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the link between multiple movement elements and sequence-related responses in the motor cortex remains elusive. This study reveals a multiplicative joint coding mechanism during motor preparation which transfers to additive during execution, potentially explaining the linear readout of elemental movements.

    • Tianwei Wang
    • , Yun Chen
    •  & He Cui

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural substrates of time perception are still unclear. Here, the authors show that as rats judged tactile stimuli, optogenetic manipulation of somatosensory cortex systematically altered perception of stimulus intensity and of duration, unveiling a multiplexed code.

    • Sebastian Reinartz
    • , Arash Fassihi
    •  & Mathew E. Diamond

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How speech sounds come to be understood as language remains unclear. Here, the authors find that brain responses to speech in part reflect abstraction of phonological units specific to the language being spoken, mediated through relationships between acoustic features.

    • Anna Mai
    • , Stephanie Riès
    •  & Timothy Q. Gentner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prediction and interpretation tasks may be challenging in high-stakes applications, such as medical decision-making, or systems with compute-limited hardware. The authors introduce an augmented framework for leveraging the knowledge learned by Large Language Models to build interpretable models which are both accurate and efficient.

    • Chandan Singh
    • , Armin Askari
    •  & Jianfeng Gao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuropil regions across the fly brain are activated by locomotion. Here, authors show that this movement-related activity involves most neurons in the dorsal fly brain, including genetically defined neurons with known, seemingly unrelated functions.

    • Evan S. Schaffer
    • , Neeli Mishra
    •  & Richard Axel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perception is often modelled using a Bayesian framework, but its neural instantiation remains unclear. Using a novel modelling approach, the authors reveal an empirical encoding scheme for visual orientation sufficient for optimal inference.

    • William J. Harrison
    • , Paul M. Bays
    •  & Reuben Rideaux

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It remains unclear how odorants with diverse appetitive preferences are encoded by an ensemble of neurons. Here, the authors show that such odorants can be succinctly described using low-dimensional neural representations or ‘neural manifolds.’

    • Rishabh Chandak
    •  & Baranidharan Raman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear whether human visual cortex exhibits representational drift. Here, the authors test the stability of visual representations and find that responsivity drifts over time, yet dissimilarities remain stable, suggesting a neural mechanism to overcome cumulative changes.

    • Zvi N. Roth
    •  & Elisha P. Merriam

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural dynamics underlying speech comprehension are not well understood. Here, the authors show that phonemic-to-lexical processing is localized to a large region of the temporal cortex, and that segmentation of the speech stream occurs mostly at the level of diphones.

    • Xue L. Gong
    • , Alexander G. Huth
    •  & Frédéric E. Theunissen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Studying visual processing during natural eye movements in untrained animals is challenging. Here, the authors provide a method for accurately measuring the retinal input to study visual processing and neural selectivity during natural oculomotor behavior in non-human primates.

    • Jacob L. Yates
    • , Shanna H. Coop
    •  & Jude F. Mitchell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the brain analyzes complex visual scenes within a fraction of a second remains poorly understood. Here, the authors suggest that this might be accomplished through the use of a temporal code by exploiting the sequence order of responses generated in networks of recurrently coupled neurons that harbor the priors of natural image statistics.

    • Yang Yiling
    • , Katharine Shapcott
    •  & Wolf Singer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Movies are complex, continuous stimuli that are characterized by visual and semantic novelty. Here, by leveraging intracranial recordings from 23 humans, the authors find that responses to novelty across film cuts and saccades are widespread in the brain.

    • Maximilian Nentwich
    • , Marcin Leszczynski
    •  & Lucas C. Parra

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Moving precisely in natural environments requires adapting to multiple demands arising dynamically. Here, the authors show that the cerebellum’s capacity for multidimensional computations allows it to flexibly control multiple movement parameters guaranteeing movement precision.

    • Akshay Markanday
    • , Sungho Hong
    •  & Peter Thier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurately capturing the tuning variability directly from the noisy neural responses is an important and challenging issue. Here, the authors introduce an unsupervised statistical approach to decomposing tuning variability, leading to a simple and unifying rule of tuning modulation in V1.

    • Rong J. B. Zhu
    •  & Xue-Xin Wei

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether orientation-selectivity is discernable via fMRI remains unclear. Here, by analyzing a public dataset of responses to natural scenes using neurally-inspired image-computable models, the authors isolate and characterize a coarse-scale orientation map and demonstrate that orientation-selective BOLD responses reflect multiple distinct computations at a range of spatial scales.

    • Zvi N. Roth
    • , Kendrick Kay
    •  & Elisha P. Merriam

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ganglion cells classically respond to either light increase (ON) or decrease (OFF). Here, the authors show that during natural scene stimulation, a single ganglion cell can switch between ON and OFF depending on the visual context.

    • Matías A. Goldin
    • , Baptiste Lefebvre
    •  & Olivier Marre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Compulsive alcohol drinking is a core feature of alcohol use disorder. Here the authors find that in rodents, neural signals in a key decision-making brain region (dmPFC) shift from behavioral control to alcohol seeking during compulsive alcohol drinking behaviour.

    • Nicholas M. Timme
    • , Baofeng Ma
    •  & Christopher C. Lapish

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It remains unclear how the hippocampal region integrates position and self-motion information to update spatial representations. Here, the authors report grid and head direction cells as well as cells encoding self-motion parameters such as angular head velocity and speed, and find conjunctive representations of these different parameters.

    • Davide Spalla
    • , Alessandro Treves
    •  & Charlotte N. Boccara

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The variability in synaptic connectivity observed at the cerebellar granule cell - Purkinje cell connection in mice accounts for motor behavior traits at the individual level, suggesting that cerebellar networks encode internal models underlying individual-specific motor adaptation.

    • Ludovic Spaeth
    • , Jyotika Bahuguna
    •  & Philippe Isope

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Face-selective neurons are observed in the primate visual pathway and are considered as the basis of face detection in the brain. Here, using a hierarchical deep neural network model of the ventral visual stream, the authors suggest that face selectivity arises in the complete absence of training.

    • Seungdae Baek
    • , Min Song
    •  & Se-Bum Paik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many behaviours depend on predictions about the environment. Here the authors find neural populations in primary visual cortex to straighten the temporal trajectories of natural video clips, facilitating the extrapolation of past observations.

    • Olivier J. Hénaff
    • , Yoon Bai
    •  & Robbe L. T. Goris

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors show that graded molecular heterogeneity in metabotropic pathways underlies a continuum of temporal responses in cerebellar unipolar brush cells (UBCs). This allows the UBC population to serve as a cell-autonomous basis for temporal integration and learning over multiple time scales.

    • Chong Guo
    • , Vincent Huson
    •  & Wade G. Regehr

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Distinct brain regions are claimed to respond selectively to faces, places and bodies, but what counts as a face, place or body is less well defined. Here we build computational models that accurately predict the response of these regions to novel images, enabling stronger tests and confirmation of their selectivity.

    • N. Apurva Ratan Murty
    • , Pouya Bashivan
    •  & Nancy Kanwisher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual processing necessitates both extracting and discarding information. Here, the authors use a specialized set of stimuli and two complementary discrimination tasks to demonstrate the opposing perceptual implications of these two aspects of information processing.

    • Corey M. Ziemba
    •  & Eero P. Simoncelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Feedback modulates visual neurons, thought to help achieve flexible task performance. Here, the authors show decision-related feedback is not only relayed to task-relevant neurons, suggesting a broader mechanism and supporting a previously hypothesized link to feature-based attention.

    • Katrina R. Quinn
    • , Lenka Seillier
    •  & Hendrikje Nienborg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural sampling theory suggests that neuronal variability encodes the uncertainty of probabilistic inferences. This paper shows that response variability in primary visual cortex reflects the statistical structure of visual inputs, as required for inferences correctly tuned to the statistics of the natural environment.

    • Dylan Festa
    • , Amir Aschner
    •  & Ruben Coen-Cagli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The human brain fluently parses continuous speech during perception and production. Using direct brain recordings coupled with stimulation, the authors identify separable substrates underlying two distinct predictive mechanisms of “when” in Heschl’s gyrus and “what” in planum temporale.

    • K. J. Forseth
    • , G. Hickok
    •  & N. Tandon

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