Person:

Maunsell, John H. R.

The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC) was conceived in the summer of 2007 at a meeting of editors and publishers of neuroscience journals. One of the working groups addressed whether it was possible to construct a system for permitting authors whose manuscript received supportive reviews at one journal but was not accepted to send a revised manuscript together with its first round of reviews to a new journal for the second round. This would speed up the review process and reduce the work for reviewers and editors. The working group not only designed a framework for transferring reviews among journals, but also implemented it as the NPRC. By the fall of 2007, more than a dozen major journals had signed onto the NPRC, sufficient to launch the experiment in January, 2008. We invite authors who have not yet used the NPRC to try this method for appropriate manuscripts. In order to encourage dissemination of the details outlined in this Editorial, it will also be published in other journals in the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.

Neuronal assemblies often exhibit stimulus-induced rhythmic activity in the gamma range (30–80 Hz), whose magnitude depends on the attentional load. This has led to the suggestion that gamma rhythms form dynamic communication channels across cortical areas processing the features of behaviorally relevant stimuli. Recently, attention has been linked to a normalization mechanism, in which the response of a neuron is suppressed (normalized) by the overall activity of a large pool of neighboring neurons. In this model, attention increases the excitatory drive received by the neuron, which in turn also increases the strength of normalization, thereby changing the balance of excitation and inhibition. Recent studies have shown that gamma power also depends on such excitatory–inhibitory interactions. Could modulation in gamma power during an attention task be a reflection of the changes in the underlying excitation–inhibition interactions? By manipulating the normalization strength independent of attentional load in macaque monkeys, we show that gamma power increases with increasing normalization, even when the attentional load is fixed. Further, manipulations of attention that increase normalization increase gamma power, even when they decrease the firing rate. Thus, gamma rhythms could be a reflection of changes in the relative strengths of excitation and normalization rather than playing a functional role in communication or control.

Scientific research produces new knowledge, technologies, and clinical treatments that can lead to enormous returns. Often, the path from basic research to new paradigms and direct impact on society takes time. Precise quantification of scientific output in the short-term is not an easy task but is critical for evaluating scientists, laboratories, departments, and institutions.While there have been attempts to quantifying scientific output, we argue that current methods are not ideal and suffer from solvable difficulties. Here we propose criteria that a metric should have to be considered a good index of scientific output. Specifically, we argue that such an index should be quantitative, based on robust data, rapidly updated and retrospective, presented with confidence intervals, normalized by number of contributors, career stage and discipline, impractical to manipulate, and focused on quality over quantity. Such an index should be validated through empirical testing.The purpose of quantitatively evaluating scientific output is not to replace careful, rigorous review by experts but rather to complement those efforts. Because it has the potential to greatly influence the efficiency of scientific research, we have a duty to reflect upon and implement novel and rigorous ways of evaluating scientific output. The criteria proposed here provide initial steps toward the systematic development and validation of a metric to evaluate scientific output.

As the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC) ends its first year, it is worth looking back to see how the experiment has worked. In order to encourage dissemination of the details outlined in this Editorial, it will also be published in other journals in the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.

Although many studies have shown that attention to a stimulus can enhance the responses of individual cortical sensory neurons, little is known about how attention accomplishes this change in response. Here, we propose that attention-based changes in neuronal responses depend on the same response normalization mechanism that adjusts sensory responses whenever multiple stimuli are present. We have implemented a model of attention that assumes that attention works only through this normalization mechanism, and show that it can replicate key effects of attention. The model successfully explains how attention changes the gain of responses to individual stimuli and also why modulation by attention is more robust and not a simple gain change when multiple stimuli are present inside a neuron's receptive field. Additionally, the model accounts well for physiological data that measure separately attentional modulation and sensory normalization of the responses of individual neurons in area MT in visual cortex. The proposal that attention works through a normalization mechanism sheds new light a broad range of observations on how attention alters the representation of sensory information in cerebral cortex.