New Discoveries about the Auditory Medial Olivocochlear System Matthew Fischl, Alia Pederson, Rebecca Voglewede, Hui Cheng, Jordan Drew et al. (see article e0382242024) Perceiving sounds requires quick and precise neuron responses to distinct features of sound. We know that auditory neurons in the cochlear nucleus (CN) and brainstem are equipped to process fast acoustic signals and that medial olivocochlear (MOC) neurons provide inhibition in the cochlea to help contribute to CN neuron processing of sound. But MOC neurons modulate the cochlea on a slow timescale, suggesting that there must be mechanisms in place that reduce …

From a glimpse of a face, people form trait impressions that operate as “facial stereotypes”, which are largely inaccurate yet nevertheless drive social behavior. Behavioral studies have long pointed to dimensions of trustworthiness and dominance that are thought to underlie face impressions due to their evolutionarily adaptive nature. Using human neuroimaging ( N =26, 19 female, 7 male), we identify a two-dimensional representation of faces’ inferred traits in the middle temporal gyrus (MTG), a region involved in domain-general conceptual processing including the activation of social concepts. The similarity of neural-response patterns for any given pair of faces in the bilateral MTG was predicted by their proximity in trustworthiness-dominance space, an effect that could not be explained by mere visual similarity. This MTG trait-space representation occurred automatically, was relatively invariant across participants, and did not depend on the explicit endorsement of face impressions

Preclinical Testing of Hypotheses from Human Studies on Reactive Stopping Jordi ter Horst, Morgane Boillot, Michael Cohen, and Bernhard Englitz (see article e0463242024) From quickly stopping in crowded places when people walk in front of you unexpectedly to slamming on your brakes in a car because a deer abruptly runs in front of it, reactive stopping is important in our day-to-day lives. Clinical research has pointed to what is called the hyperdirect pathway as the neural circuit involved in reactive stopping, but preclinical studies have yet to assess how the brain regions in this pathway …

The term digital twins appeared in a 1993 book by David Gelernter entitled Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in A Shoebox. How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean . In one sentence, digital twins are “precise, virtual copies of machines or systems” (Tao and Qi, 2019). In more detail, they are “sophisticated computer models” that “mirror almost every facet of a product, process or service” and can be constantly updated by data collected from sensors in real time (Tao and Qi, 2019). Such twins allow not only visualization but also experimentation and forecasting of future scenarios (Wickramasinghe et al., 2022) from micro to macro. They first emerged in engineering to test products, but they have now been piloted to sketch solutions and preempt problems in many contexts, from logistic management to global warming. Energy companies employ digital twins to track the operations of wind turbines, and NASA has been using digital copies (i.e., of spacecraft to monitor their