The Journal Club

Chronic ethanol exposure impairs value-based decision-making by altering striatal neurocomputations, particularly in the dorsomedial striatum, with male rats showing reduced adaptability and disrupted encoding of choices and outcomes. These effects were sex-specific, as female rats exhibited minimal behavioral changes but distinct neural alterations, highlighting differential vulnerability in striatal dynamics.

Cheng Y, Magnard R, Langdon AJ, Lee D, Janak PH. Chronic ethanol exposure produces sex-dependent impairments in value computations in the striatum. Sci Adv. 2025 Apr 4

Journal of Neuroscience April 16, 2025

“Fear” is widely viewed as a phasic response to certain-and-imminent danger, whereas “anxiety” is a sustained response to

uncertain-or-distal harm. Past work has begun to reveal the neural systems recruited by certain and uncertain anticipated threats

but has yet to rigorously plumb the moment-by-moment dynamics anticipated by theory. Here we used a novel combination of

neuroimaging techniques to demonstrate that certain and uncertain threat recruit a common threat-anticipation circuit. Activity

in this circuit and covert measures of distress showed similar patterns of context-dependent dynamics, exhibiting persistent increases when anticipating uncertain-threat encounters and transient surges just before certain encounters. These observations provide fresh insights into the neurobiology of fear and anxiety, laying the groundwork for more ambitious clinical and mechanistic research.

Journal of Neuroscience April 16, 2025

Rapid detection of rewarding objects can be essential for survival and reproduction in real life. However, finding valuable

objects, among many others, can be time-consuming and slow. In this work, we reveal reward-related changes in the receptive

fields of neurons within the prefrontal cortex of macaque monkeys that help them find valuable objects more efficiently. Such

reward-related plasticity is shown to develop slowly for objects that are consistently associated with reward and challenges

current theories of efficient search based on low-level visual features alone.

Journal of Neuroscience April 16, 2025

Understanding how neuronal response preferences emerge remains a fundamental goal in neuroscience. Our ability to target

neuron subpopulations and their embedding in circuits has greatly evolved over the last decades with the development of new

tools including transgenic mouse lines and RNA sequencing methods. Here, we focus on wide-field vertical cells (WFV) which

are found in the superior colliculus, a visual center in the midbrain that is highly conserved across species. Our findings

challenge earlier definitions of this cell type and reconcile them with more modern approaches. Due to their conservation

and connectivity, WFV present a model of choice to investigate how neurons gain their response specificity and relationships

between structure, function, implication in behavior, and molecular profiles.

Journal of Neuroscience April 16, 2025

Neural oscillations have been extensively implicated in memory encoding. However, recent advances show that oscillations

are often confounded with aperiodic activity, motivating further investigation of aperiodic dynamics in memory. Here we

analyze a dataset of intracranial human EEG recordings to test the hypothesis that aperiodic activity plays a role in memory,

distinct from oscillations. By leveraging a new approach to time-resolved spectral parameterization, we find event-related

changes in both oscillations and aperiodic activity. Based on our observations, we posit a speculative role for aperiodic activity

in cognition, complementary to that of neural oscillations, in a form of neural communication through aperiodic dynamics.

Journal of Neuroscience April 16,2025

Goudar et al. (2024) used a novel, high-dimensional version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and an unsupervised computational model (input–output HMM-GLM) to compare rule-switching strategies in humans and monkeys. They found that while both species employed similar inference strategies, monkeys were slower to adapt, made more errors, and showed less sensitivity to feedback, highlighting both shared and divergent cognitive processes across species

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Journal of Neuroscience April 9, 2025

Anatomical studies in nonhuman primates demonstrate that frontostriatal circuits are essential for integration of neural func-tions underlying reward processing and cognition, with human neuroimaging studies linking alterations in frontostriatal net-works to psychopathology. The present study characterized the developmental trajectories of frontostriatal resting-statenetworks from childhood to young adulthood. We demonstrate that ventral and dorsal aspects of the striatum exhibit distinctage-related changes that predicted developmental improvements in reward-related decision-making and executive function.These results highlight that adolescence is characterized by distinct changes in frontostriatal networks that may relate to nor-mative increases in risk taking. Atypical developmental trajectories of frontostriatal networks may contribute to adolescent-onset psychopathology.

Journal of Neuroscience April 9, 2025

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that can cause impaired memory and atypical spatial behaviorssuch as “elopement” (i.e., wandering off and becoming lost). Activity in the CA1 subregion of the hippocampus supportsspatial memory and spatial cognition, making it an important candidate to study in the context of FXS; however, how neu-ronal population activity in CA1 is affected by FXS is poorly understood. In this study, we found that the coordination ofpopulations of CA1 neurons during active behavior and waking rest was impaired in a rat model of FXS. These results revealhippocampal physiological deficits that may contribute to cognitive impairments in FXS.