Editorial: Rising Stars in Systems Neuroscience: 2022 Provisionally Accepted

Mazyar Fallah^1* Juhee Hamm^2* Ada Ledonne^3*

• ¹College of Biological Science, University of Guelph, Canada
• ²Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, United States
• ³Department of Experimental Neuroscience, Santa Lucia Foundation (IRCCS), Italy

When a problem remains unsolved, sometimes it requires a new perspective. Often, these fresh 13 approaches come from those early in their careers: trying new things or taking ideas and 14 methodologies from one field of research to advance another. By doing so, new answers arise, which 15 generate the next set of questions, and make them Rising Stars. This research topic invited early 16 career researchers nominated by established Editors to share their latest advances across the range of 17 systems neuroscience research areas. Five Rising Stars answered the call. 18 19We present to you three research articles, one review and one hypothesis and theory paper. These five 20 cover a broad span of the field. Three papers focus on visual neuroscience, one on neuroinformatics, 21 and one on consciousness or more precisely its loss through anesthesia. The techniques covered span 22 slice-based molecular and cellular neuroscience, non-human primate neurophysiology, human 23 perception and sensorimotor integration, and computational modelling. And all of them take a new 24 look at old phenomena. 25Starting in the realm of visual neuroscience, there's a comprehensive new look at what happens when 26 you blink. In much of active behaving vision research, participants (be they humans or non-human 27 primates) are asked to fixate on a central point to keep their eyes still in some paradigms (with manual 28 responses) or move their eyes around the scene in others (da Silva Lima and Ventura, 2023). In the 29 first case, eye blinks would generally cause the trial to be aborted because visual processing was 30 interrupted. In the latter, eye blinks are often cut out of the data to be analyzed because eye tracking 31 was interrupted. Through both cases then, the paradigms generally focus on understanding visual 32 perception without blinking, which is not how we naturally view our environment. Willett et al. ( 2023) 33 review how eye blinks affect visual perception, the neural circuitry involved, and potential mechanisms 34 that give rise to these effects while allowing us to maintain a stable perception of the world around us. 35Incorporating visual perception changes around eye blinks will be important to further advance our 36 understanding of natural vision. In a related area, saccadic eye movements (rapid, ballistic movements of the eyes that change the point 38 of fixation) are well studied, both from using them as a direct spatial response and as a way to measure 39 sensorimotor integration, target selection, salience maps and decision-making processes (Jay and 40 Sparks, 1987;Moore and Fallah, 2001;Van der Stigchel and Theeuwes, 2006;Goldberg et al., 2006;41 Giuricich et al., 2023). Kehoe and Fallah (2023) turn this around through recent spatiotemporal 42 analyses of shifts in the trajectory of saccades to a target in the presence of a distractor to hypothesize 43 that it is competition within the most relevant stage of the visual hierarchy (Felleman and Van Essen, 44 1991) that provides the weighting of saccade motor plans that produce the trajectory shifts. Kehoe and 45Fallah also suggest how this method can be used to infer timing of visual processing at different stages 46 and how that could be used for clinical studies, enhancing the use of eye tracking as a clinical diagnostic 47 tool. 48Active vision, the combination of fixations and saccades, has been well tested in visual search 49 paradigms (Wolfe, 2020). Much of this research has resulted in attentional or salience models (e.g. 50 Bruce and Tsotsos, 2005;Itti, Koch, and Neibur, 1998) that can be used to predict fixation locations 51 when looking around a natural scene. These models tend to be accurate for predicting the first couple 52 of fixations from stimulus-driven salience but have more trouble with exhaustive search. Later models 53 focused on probabilistic mechanisms which improved performance. Bujia et al. ( 2022) take the 54 probabilistic approach further by the use of a Bayesian approach to saliency maps. They showed the 55 value in this Bayesian approach by accurately predicting the path of fixations taken until the target is 56 found and outperforming other models. Their results further advance the tenets behind Bayesian 57 perception. 58In the brain, the populational activities of multiple neurons represent complex neural information, 59which mediate a variety of cognitive functions (Buzsaki and Draguhn, 2004). Investigation of 60 populational neural activities of specific brain regions and network dynamics can be performed by 61 extracellular electrophysiological techniques such as local field potential recordings (Hong and Lieber, 62 2019). Extracting information from neural recording data using the Fourier transform-based spectral 63 analysis has been widely used to infer a change in neural oscillations by observing a change in the 64 power of a frequency band. Using simulations, Perrenoud and Cardin (2023) further dive into this 65 approach and demonstrate how the degree of periodicity (repetition in time) in neural signals 66determines the interpretation of spectral analysis results. Perrenoud and Cardin propose an alternative 67 way of analyzing non-periodic neural data as a train of recurring events (Perrenoud and Cardin, 2023). 68This new framework would contribute to our understanding of complex neural data. 69Anesthetics induce loss of consciousness, which is crucial for reducing sensation and pain during 70 medical procedures. Outside the clinical setting, anesthetics have also significantly contributed to our 71 understanding of consciousness and brain function. Ketamine is a commonly used anesthetic for 72 induction and maintenance of anesthesia and harbors unique characteristics of enhancing neural 73 activities in the thalamus and cortex. Up until now, ketamine's actions have been explained by its 74 antagonistic effects on the glutamatergic NMDA receptor, causing neural circuit disinhibition 75 (Homayoun and Moghaddam, 2007;Seamans, 2008). Bieber and colleagues present new evidence that 76 ketamine also modulates synaptic inputs mediated by the AMPA receptor, a different glutamate 77 receptor subtype. Precisely, by patch-clamp recordings in brain slices of mice, Bieber and colleagues 78 demonstrated that s-ketamine enhances thalamocortical and intracortical AMPA receptor-mediated 79 synaptic transmission without altering the intrinsic properties of cortical and thalamic cells (Bieber, 80 Schwerin et al., 2022). This evidence provides interesting insights on the multifaceted cellular 81 mechanisms behind ketamine's actions. 82Taken together, these papers highlight the value of new viewpoints and new approaches by Rising 83Stars. It will be interesting to see how these ideas evolve within their fields over time and what the 84 Rising Stars do next. 85