Statistical learning guide attention by shaping anticipatory oculomotor behavior. Here, the authors show that microsaccades are biased to expected distractor locations before stimulus onset and predic...

By combining magnetoencephalography and eye tracking, this study sheds light on why people fixate on some parts of natural scenes longer than others. Rather than visual complexity, fixation durations ...

In this Article, Iggena et al. show that memories of real-world navigational episodes do not simply fade but are continuously reshaped over decades through shifting contributions of episode-related sp...

Using AI coding tools can speed up your work, but there are plenty of pitfalls.

Yulu Hou and her partner experimented with using ChatGPT to automate marking of undergraduate assignments. Here’s what they learnt.

Zolnik et al. propose that the long-overlooked neocortical layer 6b (L6b) supports a key circuit for attention and related cognitive functions. L6b integrates neuromodulatory and cortical feedback to ...

How animals detect Earth’s magnetic field remains a mystery in sensory biology. Despite extensive behavioral evidence, the neural circuitry and molecular mechanisms responsible for magnetic sensing re...

Collectives exhibit intrinsically different operations, resources and limitations depending on whether their components are static or mobile. Werfel examines learning in mobile collectives and shows h...

Zou et al. reveal a key difference between human brains and large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are optimized to predict the next word, the human brain modulates prediction efficiency by strategi...

More than three decades of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has gathered extensive evidence of auditory and visual attention effects in th…

Attention fluctuates over time and across contexts—how is this reflected in the brain? Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, Song and colleagues show that the geometry of neural dynamics alo...

Seeber et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. Neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly, demonstrating parallels between navigational, im...

In recent years, numerous publications have emerged claiming that animals possess consciousness. Moreover, neurophysiological literature has discussed the possible existence of consciousness in artificial intelligence (AI). Both ideas stem from analyses of the behavior of animals and AI systems. Here, I argue that it is impossible to draw conclusions about animal consciousness based solely on their behavior. Addressing the question of animal consciousness requires an understanding of its neuronal mechanisms, and the challenge lies in whether these mechanisms can be understood. Views on this issue diverge widely, ranging from Cartesian dualism, which denies any neuronal mechanisms of consciousness, to the opposing position that consciousness is one of cognitive functions whose underlying mechanisms can be understood. Here, I support the latter view. In contrast, the problem of AI consciousness belongs to the field of computer science rather than neurophysiology. Even if artificial intelligence were to acquire consciousness in the future, it would be an AI-specific form of consciousness bearing little relation to human consciousness. Consequently, insights into the mechanisms underlying AI consciousness are unlikely to advance our understanding of human consciousness.

How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

Our ability to retrieve the names of objects in our environment is a fundamental aspect of everyday life. This process requires a complex, dynamic network of cortical and subcortical interactions. Whi...

The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recent evidence indicates that even under stable environmental and behavioral conditions, responses to sensory stimuli undergo continuous reformatt...

How the brain balances the flexibility and stability needed to both encode and maintain information during cognition remains poorly understood. Using MEG data and in-silico simulations, the authors sh...

Nature Human Behaviour - Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.