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Primary visual cortical neurons exhibit diverse responses to visual stimuli yet how these signals are integrated during visual perception is not well understood. Here, the authors show that optogenetic stimulation of neurons situated near the visually‐driven population leads to improved orientation detection in monkeys through changes in correlated variability.

Perceptually unidentifiable stimuli are encoded in the visual cortex, such as to facilitate their future processing in a task context. This form of priming may constitute a pre-attention mechanism using the mere frequency of stimulus occurrence to change stimulus representations, even when sensory inputs are perceptually invisible.

Task performance is known to vary with cortical state. Here, the authors use electrical recordings in human temporal lobe to show that the same cortical state can both facilitate and suppress performance in a task-dependent manner.

Neural networks must balance associative plasticity with rapid compensatory processes to maintain stable activity patterns. Andrei et al. provide in vivo evidence of a rapid homeostatic process that decreases network connectivity when excitatory neurons are synchronously activated.

How the visual system adapts to stimuli along multiple feature axes during natural viewing is poorly understood. Here, the authors show significant enhancement of stimulus coding of image features in visual cortex after rapid exposure to an orthogonal feature.

This study investigates self-paced actions in freely foraging macaques. Findings highlight continuously evolving neural components that capture beliefs about latent reward dynamics, which are crucial for informed decision-making in a natural setting.

How the brain extracts and reproduces temporal regularities from incoming sensory information is poorly understood. Here, the authors discover the ability of neural populations in the primary visual cortex of behaving monkeys to extract precise temporal structure from unsupervised repetitive external stimulation.

Authors develop an integrated wireless system to examine brain states in freely-moving monkeys. They show that neural population activity in prefrontal cortex covaries with natural behavioral dynamics. Active behavior is associated with elevated arousal and increases in spiking activity while reducing low-frequency synchrony within cortical populations.

Shahidi et al. show that the brain uses different strategies to encode sensory stimuli and behavior. They find that visual stimuli are encoded in firing rates, whereas behavioral accuracy is correlated with spike timing regardless of spike counts.

Individual neurons at multiple stages of the visual system adapt to constant features in the visual scene, but how adaptation alters population dynamics is unknown. This paper shows that in the macaque primary visual cortex (V1), adaptation to briefly presented oriented stimuli alters pairwise correlations, with implications for the efficiency of the population code.

Behavioural tracking and wireless neural and eye-tracking recordings show that freely moving macaques learn to cooprate using visually guided signals along the visual-frontal cortical network.

Changes in synchrony of cortical populations are observed across the sleep-wake cycle, however the effect of fluctuations in synchrony during wakefulness is not understood. Here the authors show that visual cortical neurons have improved sensory encoding accuracy as well as improved perceptual performance during periods of local population desynchrony.

The combination of optogenetic manipulation with standard chamber-based electrophysiological recordings in awake nonhuman primates enables the manipulation of short- and long-range feedforward and feedback circuits