Search

How brains enable flexible behaviors in closed-loop environments is unknown. Here, the authors show a dual-pronged approach: sensory tunning reflect changes in context while pre-frontal areas dynamically remap functional coupling to maintain a context-invariant population code.

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task in mice.

Neural basis of belief embodiment is not fully understood. Here authors show that eye movements embody internal beliefs about goal location during navigation, even without visual cues. This cognitive strategy facilitates memory-guided navigation, a finding confirmed by a neural network model that accurately reflects behavioral and monkey neural data.

Noel et al. show aberrant updating of expectations in three distinct mouse models of autism spectrum disorder. Brain-wide neurophysiology data suggest this stems from excess units encoding deviations from prior mean and a lack of sensory prediction errors in frontal areas.

Natural behaviors induce changes to hidden states of the world that may be vital to track. Here, in monkeys navigating virtually to hidden goals, the authors show that neural interactions in the posterior parietal cortex play a role in tracking displacement from an unobservable goal.

In this study, the authors recorded from the cerebellum while monkeys experienced an illusory perception of self-motion, and found that the neurons encoded the erroneous linear acceleration. Their findings provide evidence that the cerebellum might be involved in the implementation of internal models, as previously hypothesized by theorists.

Research in multisensory processing has exploded in recent years, but different experimental and theoretical approaches have yielded conflicting or seemingly unrelated results. In this Review, Fetschet al. present a body of work that attempts to integrate and accommodate these findings.

Choice-related signals in neuronal activity may reflect bottom-up sensory processes, top-down decision-related influences, or a combination of the two. Here the authors report that choice-related activity in VIP neurons is not predictable from their stimulus tuning, and that dominant choice signals can bias the standard metric of choice preference (choice probability).

Observers can combine multiple sensory cues to achieve greater perceptual sensitivity, but little is known about the underlying neuronal mechanisms. Gu and colleagues found neurons in the dorsal medial superior temporal area of the macaque that had responses that were consistent with the signals expected to result from cue combination.

Using a multisensory cue-conflict task, the authors report that monkeys employ the optimal strategy of weighting each cue in proportion to its reliability, and that population decoding of neural responses from area MSTd predicts behavioral cue weighting. This behavior is further linked to the specific computations by which single neurons combine their inputs, consistent with recent theories of optimal probabilistic neural computation.

It is shown that in addition to the well-documented representation of retinal motion, primate area middle temporal area neurons are sensitive to the relative depth of stimuli defined by motion parallax. Motion parallax is a powerful depth cue that arises when the observer is moving due to near and far objects moving across the retina at different speeds.

The authors describe neurons in the macaque anterior thalamus tuned to pitch and roll orientation relative to gravity, independently of visual landmarks. Individual cells exhibit two-dimensional tuning curves peaking at a preferred vertical orientation. These results identify a thalamic pathway for gravity cues to influence three-dimensional spatial orientation.

Functional links between neuronal activity and perception are studied by examining trial-by-trial correlations (choice probabilities) between neural responses and perceptual decisions. Here the authors report that subcortical vestibular neurons show robust choice probabilities if they selectively represent self-translation, suggesting that choice-related activity emerges from a critical transformation of vestibular signals.

Sasaki et al. demonstrate that neurons in the macaque parietal cortex (ventral intraparietal area) flexibly represent object motion in either a head-centered or world-centered reference frame depending on the requirements of the task.

Head direction neurons constitute the brain’s compass, and are classically known to indicate head orientation in the horizontal plane. Here, the authors show that head direction neurons form a three-dimensional compass that can also indicate head tilt, and anchors to gravity.

Lightning Pose is an efficient pose estimation approach that requires few labeled training data owing to its semi-supervised learning strategy and ensembling.

The divisive normalization model has been influential in understanding the response properties of neurons in the visual system. Here the authors show that this computational framework can also provide a simple unifying account of the key features of multisensory integration by neurons, a research area that has traditionally been characterized by empirical principles.

Extraretinal signals such as efference copy are generally thought to be critical for discounting visual image motion caused by eye movements. However, theoretical work suggests that eye rotations could be estimated directly from optic flow. Here the authors show that MT neurons use such ‘dynamic perspective’ cues to disambiguate depth.

A modular architecture for managing and sharing electrophysiology, behavior, colony management and other data has been built to support individual laboratories or large consortia.