Animals must balance exploration with threat avoidance, yet how neuromodulatory signals shape information-seeking states remains unclear. Using fibre photometry recordings in the basolateral amygdala ...

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 ...

In recent years, the field of neuroscience has gone through rapid experimental advances and a significant increase in the use of quantitative and computational methods. This growth has created a need for clearer analyses of the theory and modeling approaches used in the field. This issue is particularly complex in neuroscience because the field studies phenomena that cross a wide range of scales and often require consideration at varying degrees of abstraction, from precise biophysical interactions to the computations they implement. We argue that a pragmatic perspective of science, in which descriptive, mechanistic, and normative models and theories each play a distinct role in defining and bridging levels of abstraction, will facilitate neuroscientific practice. This analysis leads to methodological suggestions, including selecting a level of abstraction that is appropriate for a given problem, identifying transfer functions to connect models and data, and the use of models themselves as a form of experiment.

Job details

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...

A non-profit creating and applying tools to characterize the molecules and wiring of the human brain, as well as to interpret how they contribute to brain functions and dysfunctions, openly sharing to...

GNB1 encephalopathy (GNB1-E) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder associated with motor dysfunction, epilepsy and learning disability caused by mutations in the gene encoding the G protein subunit Gβ...

Levodopa restores the balance between exploration and exploitation in Parkinson’s disease.

Functional synapse clusters (FSCs) are synapses with correlated presynaptic activity that are colocalized on the same neuronal dendritic branch. FSCs have been observed after learning in cortical and ...

Forgotten memories in Drosophila persist as silent memory traces and can be recovered by reminder cues. Manipulating reminders can create false memories, showing that memory reconstruction flexibly in...

Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.

Bissen et al. show that prey capture learning profoundly reshapes visual cortical circuitry and function during developmental critical periods, but not in adulthood. These learning-induced structural ...

The ARP2/3 complex works together with actomyosin in an oscillatory program at the soma to govern neuronal polarization.

This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...

The study of dynamical systems has long focused on the characterization of their asymptotic dynamics such as fixed points, limit cycles and other types of attractors and how these invariant sets chang...

Although neural activity often evolves along low-dimensional manifolds, such descriptions do not explain the dynamical mechanisms that generate, constrain, and stabilize computation. Identifying these...