Episodic timing refers to the one-shot, automatic encoding of temporal information in the brain, in the absence of attention to time. A previous magnetoencephalography (MEG) study showed that the relative burst time of spontaneous alpha oscillations (α) during quiet wakefulness was a selective predictor of retrospective duration estimation. This observation was interpreted as α embodying the “ticks” of an internal contextual clock. Herein, we replicate and extend these findings using electroencephalography (EEG), assess robustness to time-on-task effects, and test the generalizability in virtual reality (VR) environments. In three EEG experiments, 128 participants of either sex underwent 4 min eyes-open resting-state recordings followed by an unexpected retrospective duration estimation task. Experiment 1 tested participants before any tasks, Experiment 2 after 90 min of timing tasks, and Experiment 3 in VR environments of different sizes. We successfully replicated the original MEG findings in Experiment ...

Fear extinction, the gradual reduction of conditioned fear in response to a previous threatening experience that no longer predicts danger, plays a crucial role in exposure-based therapies for anxiety and trauma-related disorders. Despite the efficacy of these therapies for many, a significant number of individuals encounter difficulties in extinguishing fear, resulting in treatment resistance. Understanding the mechanisms behind the variation in extinction success among individuals remains a central pursuit in neuroscience. Recent studies have identified dopamine (DA) neurons within the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to influence the extinction process. In addition to their well-established role in signaling reward prediction errors, specific populations of VTA DA neurons also respond to the unexpected omission of an aversive stimulus, producing a signal indicative of safety. In animals capable of successful extinction, this burst of activity associated with stimulus omission diminishes over time, signalin...

Mirror invariance is the cognitive tendency to perceive mirror-image objects as identical. Mirrored letters, however, are distinct orthographic units and must be identified as different despite having the same shape. Consistent with this phenomenon, a small, localized region in the ventral visual stream, the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), exhibits repetition suppression to both identical and mirror pairs of objects but only to identical, not mirror, pairs of letters ( [Pegado et al., 2011][1]), a phenomenon named mirror invariance “breaking”. The ability of congenitally blind individuals to “break” mirror invariance for pairs of mirrored Braille letters has been demonstrated behaviorally ( [de Heering et al., 2018][2], [Korczyk et al., 2024][3]). However, its neural underpinnings have not yet been investigated. Here, in an fMRI repetition suppression paradigm, congenitally blind individuals (8 males and 10 females) recognized pairs of everyday objects and Braille letters in identical (“p” and “p”), mirror (...

Speech in everyday life is often masked by background noise, making comprehension effortful. Characterizing brain activity patterns when individuals listen to masked speech can help clarify the mechanisms underlying such effort. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans of either sex to investigate how neural signatures of story listening change in the presence of masking noise. We show that, as speech masking increases, spatial and temporal activation patterns in auditory regions become more idiosyncratic to each listener. In contrast, spatial activity patterns in brain networks linked to effort (e.g., cingulo-opercular network) are more similar across listeners when speech is highly masked and less intelligible, suggesting shared neural processes. Moreover, at times during stories when one meaningful event ended and another began, neural activation increased in frontal, parietal, and medial cortices. This event-boundary response appeared little affected by backg...

In a dense-sampling resting–state functional magnetic resonance imaging study, Wang et al. (2025) recorded two individuals’ functional connectivity patterns over 30 consecutive days to find a marker of the passage of time in the human brain. The authors measured the similarity of brain connectivity patterns over days, focusing on key regions involved in spatial navigation and declarative memory that have been previously shown to exhibit slow changes in activity patterns over time: the entorhinal cortex (EC) and the hippocampus (HPC). The authors show that connectivity pattern similarity decreased over time—more temporally distant resting-states had more distinct functional connectivity profiles. This result is consistent with the idea that brain activity intrinsically drifts over time (Driscoll et al., 2022). Additionally, the authors observed an anatomical gradient such that the anterior HPC showed stronger temporal drift than the posterior HPC, and the anterolateral EC showed stronger temporal drift than...

The nigrostriatal and mesoaccumbal dopamine systems are thought to contribute to changes in behavior and learning during adolescence, yet it is unclear how the rise in gonadal hormones at puberty impacts the function of these systems. We studied the impact of prepubertal gonadectomy (GDX) on later evoked dopamine release in male Mus spicilegus , a mouse whose adolescent life history has been carefully characterized in the wild and laboratory. To examine how puberty impacts dopamine neuron function in M. spicilegus males, we removed the gonads prepubertally at postnatal day (P)25 and then examined evoked dopamine release in the dorsomedial, dorsolateral (DLS), and nucleus accumbens core regions of striatal slices at P60–70 (late adolescence/early adulthood). To measure dopamine release, we used near-infrared catecholamine nanosensors which enable study of spatial distribution of dopamine release. We found that prepubertal GDX led to a significantly reduced density of dopamine release sites and reduced dopam...

Daughterless (Da), the Drosophila melanogaster homolog of mammalian E-protein transcription factor 4 (TCF4), is well studied in fruit fly embryonic development but its functions in adult nervous system are poorly understood. Mutations in human TCF4 gene lead to intellectual disabilities such as Pitt–Hopkins syndrome and TCF4 has also been linked to schizophrenia. Here, to explore the roles of Da in the Drosophila mature brain, we map Da DNA binding sites and study the transcriptomics of the brains where Da function is inhibited by pan-neuronal Extramacrohaete (Emc) overexpression, in both male and female Drosophila . Our transcriptome analyses reveal that in the adult brain Da regulates the expression of genes involved in behavior, memory, synaptic signaling, protein translation, and metabolic processes. Moreover, combining the RNA sequencing data with Da ChIP sequencing results indicates that genes associated with neuronal projection guidance, metabolism, and translation are direct targets of Da. In addit...

Alpha peak frequency (APF) is defined as a prominent spectral peak within the 8–12 Hz frequency range. Typically, an individual's alpha frequency is regarded as a stable neurophysiological marker. A wealth of recent evidence, however, indicates that APF shifts within short timescales in relation to task demands and even spontaneously so. Further, brain stimulation studies often report shifts in APF both within and between experimental sessions, directly contradicting the idea of a stable APF. To characterize the nonstationarities in spectral parameters, we estimated APFs from 1 s epochs of resting-state magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings from healthy adults of either sex. To enhance signal-to-noise ratio, without compromising on temporal resolution, we averaged power spectra within parcelled regions. Our findings indicate that variation in APFs exacerbates along the posterior-to-anterior cortical plane, i.e., from the occipital to the frontal cortices. Further, by comparisons with amplitude-matched si...

Autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder are neuropsychiatric conditions that manifest early in life with a wide range of phenotypes, including repetitive behavior, agitation, and anxiety ( [American Psychological Association, 2013][1]). While the etiology of these disorders is incompletely understood, recent data implicate a role for mitochondrial dysfunction ( [Norkett et al., 2017][2]; [Khaliulin et al., 2025][3]). Mitochondria translocate to intracellular compartments to support energetics and free-radical buffering; failure to achieve this localization results in cellular dysfunction ( [Picard et al., 2016][4]). Mitochondrial Rho-GTPase 1 ( Miro1 ) resides on the outer mitochondrial membrane and facilitates microtubule-mediated mitochondrial motility ( [Fransson et al., 2003][5]). The loss of MIRO1 is reported to contribute to the onset/progression of neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease ( [Kay et al., 20...

The life cycle of the model nematode Caenorhabditis elegans involves a choice between two alternative developmental trajectories. Hermaphroditic larvae can either become reproductive adults or, under conditions of crowding or low food availability, enter a long-term, stress-resistant diapause known as the dauer stage. Chemical signals from a secreted larval pheromone promote the dauer trajectory in a concentration-dependent manner, and their influence can be antagonized by increased availability of a microbial food source. The decision is known to be under neuronal control, involving both sensory and interneurons. However, little is known about the dynamics of the underlying circuit, and the circuit mechanisms by which short-term fluctuations in the ratio of food and pheromone experienced by individual larvae are remembered and averaged over several hours. To investigate this, we quantitatively characterized the neuronal responses to food and pheromone inputs by measuring calcium traces from ASI and AIA ne...