Perception articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    Activity in regions of the brain have been correlated with decision making but determining whether such relationships are correlative or causative has been challenging; using a technique to reversibly inactivate brain areas in monkeys reveals that although there is decision-related activity in the lateral intraparietal (LIP) area, LIP is not critical for the perceptual decisions studied here.

    • Leor N. Katz
    • , Jacob L. Yates
    •  & Alexander C. Huk

  • 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

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    Vampire bats sense infrared radiation to locate places where blood flows close to their prey's skin. At a molecular level, this ability is underpinned by the intricate redesign of an ion channel on facial nerves. See Letter p.88

    • M. Brock Fenton

  • Outlook |

    Certain things taste differently to different people. Why is this, and does this affect our choice of food?

    • Michael Eisenstein

  • News & Views |

    How is light perceived? The answer that might immediately come to mind is, through the eyes. Fly larvae, however, can 'feel' light using specialized neurons embedded under the cuticle encasing their bodies. See Article p.921

    • Paul A. Garrity

  • News and Views Q&A |

    The ability to perceive Earth's magnetic field, which at one time was dismissed as a physical impossibility, is now known to exist in diverse animals. The receptors for the magnetic sense remain elusive. But it seems that at least two underlying mechanisms exist — sometimes in the same organism.

    • Kenneth J. Lohmann

  • Letter |

    Animals must detect water in their environment to stay alive, but the molecular basis for water detection has been unclear. Here the essential mediators of water-sensing and drinking in fruitflies have been identified: an ion channel of the degenerin/epithelial sodium channel family, and the sensory neurons that make it.

    • Peter Cameron
    • , Makoto Hiroi
    •  & Kristin Scott

  • Books & Arts |

    French chemist Hervé This is a pioneer of the field of molecular gastronomy, the science of cooking. From perfecting the boiled egg to making custards with meat proteins, he has advised top chefs worldwide. He tells Nature why he is moving on to 'note-by-note' cuisine using compounds to build taste and smells, and why turkey is best cooked in the dishwasher.

    • Michael White

  • Letter |

    Reactive electrophiles are noxious chemicals, such as acrolein in cigarette smoke, and are detected by the ion channel TRPA1 in humans. Here it is shown that TRPA1 channels sense these chemicals in the gustatory chemosensory neurons of fruitflies and mosquitoes, too. Further findings show that, unlike with other chemical senses such as smell or taste, the detection of reactive electrophiles relies on an ancient sensor that has been conserved in molecular detail through some 500 million years of evolution.

    • Kyeongjin Kang
    • , Stefan R. Pulver
    •  & Paul A. Garrity

  • News |

    The positioning of people's photos affects how attractive and powerful they seem to be.

    • Matt Kaplan

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