Yiu et al (2014) & Ramirez et al. (2013)

I found the Yiu et al, paper to be much easier to read, despite its length, than the Ramirez et al. paper. The Yiu paper was clear in how it moved from experiment to experiment and I wound up being very convinced of their findings. I certainly feel that they accomplished what they set out to do in the paper and really made a great contribution to the field of neuroscience with their findings. One drawback to the paper I could articulate is that some of the studies they did seemed superfluous. For instance, adding in optogenetics was a bit unnecessary in my opinion. Though it does show fantastic temporal control in inducing excitability, temporal control wasn’t really a part of their original hypothesis. And though the experiment with optogenetics did serve to further prove their hypothesis that excitation is what is causing neurons to be preferentially recruited to a memory trace, it seemed as though it was just one more replication of the same experiments they did earlier in the paper, and it was a bit repetitive.

The Ramirez et al. paper was incredibly dense in my opinion. Though it was much shorter, it was due to a notable lack of explanation in the text, which the Yiu et al. paper included. This is the norm in the field at times, so it is difficult to fault them for this, but I preferred the extra length in the Yiu et al. paper to the lack of in-depth understanding I got from the Ramirez et al. paper. In addition, this study was incredibly interesting, but during reading I lost a lot of interest due to the feeling that I was slogging through figures. They were labeled oddly and I have trouble determining the purpose of the dashed lines in some of the figures. Upon first reading it, I also felt that some of the behavioral studies were superfluous and got the feeling that there was a lot of replication with subtle nuanced differences. All in all, this paper was incredibly impactful and well executed, however I believe it would have had a much more profound impact on a larger audience if it was not quite so concise.