Cognitive neuroscience articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    A method to measure the precise relationship between neuronal firing rates and the representation of accumulated evidence is described; results in the parietal and prefrontal cortex of rats, together with transient optogenetic inactivation of the prefrontal cortex, challenge the prevailing view that the prefrontal cortex is part of the neural circuit for accumulating evidence, and suggest that neurons in parietal and prefrontal areas have distinct relationships to evidence accumulation in decision-making.

    • Timothy D. Hanks
    • , Charles D. Kopec
    •  & Carlos D. Brody

  • Letter |

    Many factors have been proposed as contributors to risk of alcohol abuse, but quantifying their influence has been difficult; here a longitudinal study of a large sample of adolescents and machine learning are used to generate models of predictors of current and future alcohol abuse, assessing the relative contribution of many factors, including life history, individual personality differences, brain structure and genotype.

    • Robert Whelan
    • , Richard Watts
    •  & Veronika Ziesch.

  • Outlook |

    Unravelling the mystery of verbal dysfunction in schizophrenia could yield clues to the nature of the disease.

    • David Noonan

  • Letter |

    Direct neural recordings from electrodes over bilateral cortices show that sensory–motor transformations for speech occur bilaterally; neural responses are robust during both perception and production in an overt word-repetition task, and bilateral sensory–motor responses can perform transformations between speech-perception and speech-production representations during a non-word transformation task.

    • Gregory B. Cogan
    • , Thomas Thesen
    •  & Bijan Pesaran

  • Article |

    This study shows that in monkeys making context-dependent decisions, task-relevant and task-irrelevant signals are confusingly intermixed in single units of the prefrontal cortex, but are readily understood in the framework of a dynamical process unfolding at the level of the population; a recurrently connected neural network model reproduces key features of the data and suggests a novel mechanism for selection and integration of task-relevant evidence towards a decision.

    • Valerio Mante
    • , David Sussillo
    •  & William T. Newsome

  • Letter |

    Training with a multitasking video game is shown to improve cognitive control abilities that decline with age, revealing the plasticity of the ageing brain; these behavioural improvements were accompanied by underlying neural changes that predicted the training-induced boost in sustained attention and enhanced multitasking performance 6 months later.

    • J. A. Anguera
    • , J. Boccanfuso
    •  & A. Gazzaley

  • Article |

    When an animal is performing a cognitive task, individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex show a mixture of responses that is often difficult to decipher and interpret; here new computational methods to decode and extract rich sets of information from these neural responses are revealed and demonstrate how this mixed selectivity offers a computational advantage over specialized cells.

    • Mattia Rigotti
    • , Omri Barak
    •  & Stefano Fusi

  • Article |

    It is known that compressed sequences of hippocampal place cells can ‘replay’ previous navigational trajectories in linearly constrained mazes; here, rat place-cell sequences representing two-dimensional spatial trajectories were observed before navigational decisions, and predicted the immediate navigational path.

    • Brad E. Pfeiffer
    •  & David J. Foster

  • Article |

    Multi-electrode cortical recordings during the production of different consonant-vowel syllables reveal distinct speech-articulator representations that are arranged somatotopically, with temporal and spatial patterns of activity across the neural population corresponding to phonetic features and dynamics.

    • Kristofer E. Bouchard
    • , Nima Mesgarani
    •  & Edward F. Chang

  • Outlook |

    Treating cognitive problems common in elderly people requires a deeper understanding of how a healthy brain ages.

    • Alison Abbott

  • Letter |

    Studying six vespertilionid bat species of different sizes to investigate the reason why smaller bats have higher frequency echolocation calls, a model is put forward that the size/frequency range is modulated by the need to maintain a focused, highly directional echolocation beam.

    • Lasse Jakobsen
    • , John M. Ratcliffe
    •  & Annemarie Surlykke

  • News & Views |

    The discovery of stone tools dating to 71,000 years ago at a site in South Africa suggests that the humans making them had developed the capacity for complex thought, and passed this knowledge down the generations. See Letter p.590

    • Sally McBrearty

  • Books & Arts |

    Charles Fernyhough enjoys a bold exploration of how the mind extracts meaning from what we read or hear.

    • Charles Fernyhough

  • News & Views |

    Our brains focus on important events and filter out distracting ones. An investigation in monkeys reveals a surprising dissociation between the neuronal and behavioural manifestations of attention. See Letter p.434

    • Alexandra Smolyanskaya
    •  & Richard T. Born

  • Letter |

    Economic games are used to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying cooperative behaviour, and show that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, whereas reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.

    • David G. Rand
    • , Joshua D. Greene
    •  & Martin A. Nowak

  • Letter |

    Transient inactivation of the superior colliculus in primates during a motion-change-detection task is shown to lead to large deficits in visual attention while the enhanced response of neurons in the visual cortex to attended stimuli remains unchanged; this shows that processes independent of those occurring in the visual cortex have key roles in visual attention.

    • Alexandre Zénon
    •  & Richard J. Krauzlis

  • Letter |

    Optogenetic activation of parvalbumin-expressing versus other classes of interneurons is found to have distinct effects on the response properties of individual and populations of excitatory cells, as well as on visual behaviour in awake mice, providing evidence that this specific interneuron subtype has a unique role in visual coding and perception.

    • Seung-Hee Lee
    • , Alex C. Kwan
    •  & Yang Dan

  • Books & Arts |

    Nicola Clayton is fascinated by the mind of the crow, and the bird's ancient links with humankind.

    • Nicola Clayton

  • Books & Arts |

    Robert Stickgold revels in a lively account of a quest to quantify consciousness.

    • Robert Stickgold

  • Letter |

    Histone deacetylase 2 is shown to suppress genes involved in cognitive function epigenetically, potentially opening the door to treatments for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases by developing HDAC2-selective inhibitors.

    • Johannes Gräff
    • , Damien Rei
    •  & Li-Huei Tsai

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