The technique enables neuroscientists to target brain circuits with unprecedented specificity, transforming the study of memory, reward and more.

The findings provide a new perspective on how granule cells in the cerebellum help to generalize across tasks.

The transcription factors a <em>Drosophila</em> neuron expresses offer clues to its lineage and birth order—and ultimately how neural circuits emerge.

Infantile amnesia is not simply a story about forgetting the past. It is an opportunity to understand how memory itself is built.

Using experiments and theory, the authors examine how olfactory memories are encoded in the zebrafish olfactory cortex. They find that experience reshapes the internal map of odor space, making releva...

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The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.

Neural activity does not always lie in a low-dimensional subspace. The authors extend this classic view to show that task-relevant information is distributed across multiple covariability classes and ...

In mice, a sparse population of sleep-active&nbsp;long-range inhibitory neurons&nbsp;in the neocortex promote widespread&nbsp;cortical synchronization and sleep, revealing a cortical mechanism that co...

An imaging system developed to record cellular activity throughout the whole body of zebrafish&nbsp;captures cellular organ dynamics and identifies&nbsp;multiple distributed&nbsp;circuits.

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...

The Aydin Lab at Columbia University Irving Medical Center studies how gut microbiota shape the development and plasticity of the enteric nervous system.

When flies encounter a tasty smell, they stroll in and out of the odor plume to keep track of it, encoding a memory of the angle they need to travel.

Intelligent behavior requires experience-dependent internal representations of relevant information. We examined representational learning in telencephalic area pDp of adult zebrafish, the homolog of ...

Placing too much emphasis on a specific interpretation of dimensionality may lead neuroscience down the wrong path.

Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal resolution of perception.

This book explores the enduring and emerging questions in developmental biology, offering a comprehensive overview that bridges traditional concepts with the innovative inquiries shaping future resear...

Synchronized and desynchronized patterns of spontaneous activity during brain development prepare cortical circuits such as the visual cortex for processing external sensory information. Yet the neuro...

The human cerebral cortex develops through coordinated signals from within the cortex and from other brain regions, including the thalamus. However, how thalamic neuronal projections influence early h...

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.

Using a virtual reality system, experiments in Drosophila show that flies use memory mechanisms to navigate along the boundary of an odour plume and track the source of a smell.

Daniel Levenstein explains how internally generated brain activity during sleep shapes our cognition, and why NeuroAI is such a powerful approach.

Simultaneous imaging of premotor cortex and cerebellar granule cells in mice learning two skills in parallel shows that trajectories generalize in cortex but coherently reorient apart in granule cells...

Distinguishing visual input generated by active eye movements from input due to external events is a fundamental challenge for visual processing. Here, we uncover a remarkably simple solution to this ...

A connectome of the brain and ventral nerve cord of an adult female fruit&nbsp;fly is reconstructed and annotated, providing an open resource that reveals neural control&nbsp;of behaviour to be distri...

Huszár, Kirsanov et al. show that hippocampal CA3 and CA1 neurons born on the same day form a functional subcircuit that encodes new memories. Spatial learning engaged convergent connectivity from emb...

Burst firing in vestibular cortex enables distributed coding of natural self-motion by optimizing information transmission.

The authors present a dense connectomic reconstruction of a 0.1 mm3 hippocampal CA3 volume and reveal spatial gradients, high convergence and cell-type-selective feedforward inhibition of inputs to py...

Kevin Mitchell talks with Timothy Behrens about ring attractors, the role of innate structure, and an expanded view of cognitive maps.

Theta sweeps have been mired in controversy for decades, but the emerging consensus view suggests that they function in attention and goal direction.