anything lit in todays nature issue?
http://www.nature.com/nature/current_issue.html
seems like a pretty boring one without any interesting articles
bump
reminder you can access articles through sci hub
>>8203273
Very cool finding about tool creation and use by capuchin monkeys 750 years ago. I imagine they've been doing it even longer than that. Shame they can't get from sharpened rock to bow and arrow though.
>>8203480
that looks pretty cool but it was published in another journal
For my field, this one is pretty fucking interesting:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7611/full/nature18617.html
I haven't fully read it yet, but at first glance it appears to undermine the assumption that choice probability (the phenomenon that you can predict an animal's decisions before they've made them overtly, based on neural activity alone) reflects the neural machinery of decision making that is at play.
I'm going to have to read this in detail, and especially see how it relates to this paper:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150204/ncomms7177/full/ncomms7177.html
This latter paper seems to suggest that there are two distinct mechanisms that contribute to choice probability, and both operate at different time scales. The timing of the behavioral task used in the first paper is therefore of critical importance for the implications of their findings.
>>8203537
Broadly consistent with LIP as the region of maintenence after decision formation. Would have been cool if they had checked if LIP deactivation reduces choice probability in area MT, but they didn't.
>>8203652
I'll try to summarize it in simple terms but I have a few other things to finish before. Give me an hour or so.
>>8203273
I see plenty of interesting articles. Bet you're just a fag.
>>8203652
The paper is about which neural systems enable us to make decisions. The process of decision making is often studied in the lab by using a very simple stimulus display, based on which an animal (or person) needs to make a decision. The animal sees a cloud of dots, of which a certain proportion moves coherently in one direction, while the rest of the dots move randomly. The animal is 'asked' in which direction the dots moved, and it responds by moving its eyes to a particular location.
This particular paradigm has been used for quite some time, and enabled the mapping of which brain areas are involved in such decisions. The first discovery was that of brain area MT, which is relatively low in the hierarchy of the visual system. That area specifically encodes movement, so plays an obvious role in detecting the direction of moving dots. In this area, the neural activity while the monkey views the stimulus display predicts which choice it will make, even before the animal has actually made the choice. That phenomenon is called choice probability.
Later on, brain area LIP was discovered, in which the neurons showed an even more intricate pattern. Not only did neurons there show choice probability, the spike rate of these neurons represents the temporal integral of the motion strength. This means that the activity in LIP reflects some integration process that sums up the sensory evidence in favor of one decision over another. Moreover, these neurons do so irrespective of the sensory modality (e.g. also when an animal is doing an auditory task instead of a visual one), so are domain general. These findings led to the view that LIP is critical for the integration of several other distributed processes that together lead to a decision, and that view has dominated for quite some time.
This paper actually shows that this view is wrong, because temporarily deactivating LIP doesn't affect the animal's ability to make decisions.
>>8203769
So does that mean all the LIP research is useless or do they provide any hypothesis for whats going on?
>>8203707
sorry
ill make the same thread tomorrow but then about science
>>8203800
It doesn't mean that all LIP research is useless, it just means that LIP does something else than we assumed it did.
An alternative view is that LIP is not actually responsible for integration of sensory evidence, but instead represents the evidence that is already integrated somewhere else in the brain. It's computational role then would be to actively maintain the decision over time.
In this particular paradigm the animal responds as soon as it's made a decision, meaning that there is no decision to maintain in working memory. In an alternative paradigm where there is some delay between the stimulus and the response, it might well be that knocking out LIP impairs the behavioral performance.
>>8203769
Thanks for that
>>8203814
Pretty interesting, thank you for the explanation
>>8203803
Do it now
