In this episode, we hear about the emerging field of palaeoshellomics, wasp eggs that keep their food fresh, a monkey with a missing visual cortex, new biological methods inspired by astronomy and how to mix a family with a research career.
A hub in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex receives unusually high and functionally diverse inputs, providing a biological interface between motivation, incentive based learning, and decision making.
Colored surfaces induce strong gamma-synchronization yet sparse firing in V1 when receptive field inputs are predicted from the surrounding spatial context.
The spatial and dynamic properties of self-motion signals are acquired at the first stage of otolith signal transformation, which is in the brainstem and cerebellum, and conserved across brainstem, cerebellar and cortical areas.
A decoding-based, state-space reconstruction reveals that neurons in macaque IT cortex change the structure of their collective attractor dynamics depending on task contexts.
Molecular, genetic, and functional analysis is used to show that the olfactory Na+/Ca2+, K+ exchanger NCKX4 is expressed in cone photoreceptors and is critical for the wide operating range and high temporal resolution of cone-mediated vision.
Cerebellar Purkinje neurons use a multiplexed simple spike code combining synchrony/spike time and firing rate, with each component encoding distinct information about movements such as motion onset timing and kinematics.
