eLife Assessment
This important study aimed to identify how chronic heat exposure affects subsequent behavior and brain function. This work positively expands the field of thermoregulation. The data were collected using a myriad of next-generation approaches, including extensive behavior testing, thermal monitoring, electrophysiology, circuit mapping, and manipulations. As a result the strength of evidence is mostly solid, however a few weaknesses drove the some of the conclusions to be incompletely supported. These largely circle around the question of how unique these effects are to thermal stress (as opposed to other forms of stress), a lack of statistical analyses and rigor in some of the experiments and figures, and the specificity of the POA-pPVT pathway compared to other inputs to the PVT in the control of observed effects.