Phasic reward prediction signals in ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA) neurons and basal forebrain (BF) noncholinergic bursting neurons are remarkably similar despite the distinct circuit…

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 01 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02573-7Tangible rewards are known to sharpen visual processing of associated objects. Tomić et al. show that an internal sense of confidence—acting as an intrinsic reward—similarly biases attention, revealing how the brain prioritizes limited resources.

Conference Abstracts

Conference Abstracts

Conference Abstracts

How the cortex maintains stable memories despite highly volatile individual cell activity remains a fundamental puzzle. Using long-term imaging in mice, Descamps et al. reveal that the anterior cingulate cortex overcomes single-cell instability through collective network-level organization, creating stable and efficient population codes for spatial objects.

Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism - Volume 49

Recent changes in Genentech’s scientific organization, occurring as the company makes artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly central to its research strategy, highlight a broader question facing bi...

Physical learning systems require a means to store information about the past. In the brain, information is thought to be stored in synaptic connections between neurons whose weights change in respons...

Learning reshapes cortical activity, but it remains unclear whether population-level changes primarily reflect exposure to sensory statistics or reward-driven assignment of behavioral relevance. We an...

At the Redacted Reading Room, there is an area carefully and beautifully carved out that holds hundreds of candles, each representing the life of a victim, a survivor. Katie Phang was joined by…

The tiny cats only measure between one and two feet long and weigh between four and six pounds.

The relationship between the geometry of neural representations and the task being performed is a central question in neuroscience. The primate prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a primary focus of inquiry, as it can encode information with geometries that either rely on past experience or are experience agnostic. One hypothesis is that PFC representations should evolve with learning, from a format that supports exploration of all possible task rules to a format that minimizes the encoding of task-irrelevant features and supports generalization. Here we test this idea by recording neural activity from the macaque PFC when learning a new rule (‘XOR rule’) from scratch. We show that PFC representations progress from being high dimensional, nonlinear and randomly mixed to low dimensional and rule selective. Upon generalizing the rule to new stimuli, these representations further evolve into an abstract, stimulus-invariant geometry. These findings reconcile previously conflicting accounts of PFC f

A type of tiger cat, the animal is smaller than a house cat, slender and spotted. It lives in the Bolivian cloud forest.

Author summary Despite the complex wiring patterns found in the cortical connectome, many dynamical properties of macroscale cortical activity can be surprisingly well explained by treating the cortex...

Using a combined approach of monkey electrophysiology, artificial neural networks and human psychophysics, Xue et al. show that neuronal interference from irrelevant information underlies behavioral e...

One of the most puzzling aspects of perception is postdiction: later information can change how a previous stimulus is perceived [1,2]. This indicates that perception is not a livestream of the extern...

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The location-specific firing of hippocampal place cells changes when an animal enters a new environment, a phenomenon known as ‘remapping’. In this Perspective, André A. Fenton challenges standard mod...