Nature Reviews Neuroscience - In this Journal Club, Fanny Cazettes highlights a 2013 paper that demonstrated the importance of mixed selectivity for cortical computations.

Various neuroscientific theories maintain that brain oscillations are important for neuronal computation, but opposing views claim that these macroscale dynamics are ‘exhaust fumes’ of more relevant p...

In these financially straitened times, funders must recognize that great discoveries often arise from work that was looking for something completely different.

Humans exhibit a striking tendency to persist with chosen goals. This strong attachment to goals can often appear irrational – a perspective captured by terms such as perseverance or sunk-cost biases. In this review, we explore how goal commitment could stem from several adaptive mechanisms, including those that optimise cognitive resources, shield decisions from interference, and scaffold motivation in the absence of accessible reward signals. We propose that these computational considerations have important implications for algorithmic architectures supporting decision making, including separate algorithms for goal selection and implementation, and for monitoring ongoing goals versus alternative sources of reward. Finally, we discuss how a variety of mechanisms supporting goal commitment and abandonment could relate to dimensions affected in mental health.

Nature Human Behaviour - Paluch et al. show that unattended working memory items, as well as attended ones, are encoded in persistent activity in the medial temporal lobe.

Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...

Han et al. show that frontal theta oscillations rhythmically control access to working memory. The theta rhythm sweeps across the mental image, shaping behavior by coordinating spikes and beta oscilla...

A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. This is thought to occur in part by recruiting early...

The flexible control of working memory (WM) requires prioritizing immediately task-relevant information while maintaining information with potential future relevance in a deprioritized state. Using do...

Author summary In everyday life, we focus on what matters—like finding our car keys on a messy desk—by sending signals from higher control brain areas to earlier sensory brain areas. These “top-down” ...