Assistive algorithms are widely used in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), but their effects on neural representations remain unclear. Here, the authors show that adaptive BCIs lead the brain to learn ...

In 1992, I introduced Stoppard to the professor who put chaos into biology. A year later I reviewed the play that came out of it. As Arcadia is about to leave the West End, here's what happened.

Spotlight on DREADDs and chemogenetics

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...

How does an intelligent visual system combine what objects look like with how they move while remaining robust as appearance changes? We addressed this question by comparing human perception and neura...

Susumu Tonegawa, a renowned MIT professor of biology and neuroscience and a Nobel laureate, has died at the age of 86. His discovery of how the immune system generates many different antibodies earned...

Visual systems evolved to extract behaviorally relevant information while animals move through and interact with their world. Such ecological vision differs fundamentally from standard laboratory paradigms in many key aspects, making this a much harder problem for the brain to solve, and for the neuroscientist to study. However, emerging technologies and experimental approaches have enabled investigation of visual computations under these ecological conditions. These approaches are particularly powerful in the mouse, combining well-developed genetic tools, high-throughput recordings, and quantifiable ethological tasks. Here we review computations that are engaged in ecological contexts, including active sensing, motion processing, scene analysis, distance estimation, and spatial perception. We delineate experimental approaches that engage these computations and synthesize current understanding of their neural implementations based on mouse research. These studies reveal how ecological vision engages distinct processing strategies and novel neural circuitry, while highlighting the vast territory that remains unexplored in understanding real-world visual computation.

Author summary Percepts, actions and experiences, such as the appearance of an apple and its flavour, are represented in the activity of populations of neurons in various parts of the brain. For decad...

Learning is thought to arise from synaptic modifications embedded in brain-wide circuits, yet how such circuits coordinate plasticity to support complex behaviour is not known. Inspired by deep learni...

Learning is thought to arise from synaptic modifications embedded in brain-wide circuits, yet how such circuits coordinate plasticity to support complex behaviour is not known. Inspired by deep learni...

Normalization is a critical operation in neural circuits. In the brain, there is evidence that normalization is implemented via inhibitory interneurons and allows neural populations to adjust to chang...

The authors analytically determine how neuronal correlations and geometry collectively determine readout generalization across tasks and show how these geometric features follow distinct trajectories ...

Psychedelics rose to prominence in the 1960s, around the same time when neurobiologists identified the midbrain raphe as the brain’s primary source of serotonin...

Categorization, the grouping of objects, living organisms, actions or events into equivalence clusters, is fundamental to adaptive behaviour. In this Perspective, Barrett and Miller discuss evidence t...

In this study, the authors find that synaptic strength predicts spine size and long-term stability via in vivo imaging together with optogenetic stimulation in awake mice. While individual synapses sh...

Neurons in medial entorhinal cortex collectively represent discrete nonlocal positions during immobility. During this nonlocal coding, CA1 is uncoupled from entorhinal cortex. These representations ar...

Neural population activity can be described either by low-dimensional dynamics on neural manifolds or by single-neuron selectivities. Using a theoretical approach, Pezon et al. relate these two statis...

The Neural Dynamics (CATNIP) Lab, led by Memming Park at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, is seeking a Postdoctoral Fellow to extract organizing principles of neural comput...

Optogenetic climbing fiber activation regulates experience-dependent plasticity in the primary somatosensory cortex of mice, suggesting a role of the olivo-cerebellum in instructive signaling across b...

This paper demonstrates an approach for learning highly semantic image representations without relying on hand-crafted data-augmentations. We introduce the Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Archi...

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)

Dans un entretien au « Monde », l’un des pères de l’intelligence artificielle milite pour une prise de conscience des risques liés à cette technologie et plaide en faveur de l’établissement de lignes ...

Artificial-intelligence systems are feeding on Wikipedia without giving back, and academic indifference is threatening the survival of what is arguably the most widely used reference work on the plane...