WILD is a wireless device that can record neuronal activity, perform optogenetic stimulations, record animal movements, record the environment or eye movements via an integrated camera, analyze the da...

Nature Neuroscience - Senne, Suthard and colleagues show that dorsal hippocampal astrocytes display time-compressed calcium-event sequences after foot shock and upon context re-exposure, and that...

The study of cross-species differences in the organization of the cerebral cortex received significant attention during the past century. However, the evolutionary principles governing changes in bra...

Rapid learning, memory, and generalization are often attributed to circuits of the neocortex and hippocampus, but their specific role remains unclear. To examine these cognitive abilities together in ...

The authors use recurrent neural networks to predict how structured prior experience shapes neural dynamics as mice learn flexible timing strategies during complex context-dependent behavior.

Bats navigating clutter must steer around obstacles to avoid collision, while simultaneously planning future flight trajectories. In this study, we investigated active sensing strategies of two bat sp...

YouTube video by nature video

Auditory processing is traditionally framed as a hierarchical extraction of acoustic features along a canonical ascending pathway, starting in the coc…

The hippocampus exhibits a CA3-to-CA1 coding transformation that combines fast learning with an efficient, compressed neural code.

Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...

The auditory system differs from other senses in the complexity of its subcortical pathways. King and colleagues examine how subcortical structures transform sound representations and integrate sensor...

Topography is a well-described and well-known concept for cortical organization in primary sensory and motor cortices of mammalian brains. Similar ...

Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

Learning by imitation is the foundation for verbal and musical expression, but its underlying neural basis remains obscure. A juvenile male zebra finch imitates the multisyllabic song of an adult tutor in a process that depends on a song-specialized cortico-basal ganglia circuit, affording a powerful system to identify the synaptic substrates of imitative motor learning. Plasticity at a particular set of cortico-basal ganglia synapses is hypothesized to drive rapid learning-related changes in song before these changes are subsequently consolidated in downstream circuits. Nevertheless, this hypothesis is untested and the synaptic locus where learning initially occurs is unknown. By combining a computational framework to quantify song learning with synapse-specific optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and directly downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit, we identified the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapses that drive the acquisition and expression of rapid vocal changes during juvenile song learning and characterized the hours-long timescale over which these changes consolidate. Furthermore, transiently augmenting postsynaptic activity in the basal ganglia briefly accelerates learning rates and persistently alters song, demonstrating a direct link between basal ganglia activity and rapid learning. These results localize the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapses that enable a juvenile songbird to learn to sing and reveal the circuit logic and behavioral timescales of this imitative learning paradigm. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Institutes of Health, K99 NS144525 (DCS), F32 MH132152 (DCS), F31 HD098772 (SB), R01 NS099288 (RM), RF1 NS118424 (RM and JP)

Predictive theories of cognitive mapping propose that these representations encode the predictive relationships among contents as experienced by the n…

How are various visual signals integrated in the vertebrate brain for navigation? Here authors show that different spatial signals are topographically organized and align to one another in the zebrafi...

Vertebrate eyes first evolved in water, where spectral content rapidly fades with distance. Zebrafish exploit this loss by antagonizing cone signals to suppress the background, pointing to distance es...

Whether and how anatomically distinct regions of the superior colliculus (SC) exhibit specialisation in multisensory temporal integration to facilitate different behavioural responses are not fully un...

Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...

Vocal production is a complex behavior across the animal kingdom that relies on coordinated motor and auditory networks. However, the contribution of sensory areas in vocal control remains poorly unde...