🚨 We’re hiring a postdoc! 🚨

Excited for our new NiCE grant with @lauerlab.bsky.social @batwoman123.bsky.social 🎉We use a comparative approach, two-photon imaging & optogenetics to identify why bats🦇 and deer mice resist noise but lab mice don't.

If you're interested, please DM or e-mail me!

Two-photon imaging in awake bats reveals that the inferior colliculus encodes vocalization categories as categorical primitives—spatially clustered, category-selective neurons that enable early, efficient, and structured processing

@kishoreneuro.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Work from @kishoreneuro.bsky.social and Moss labs shows that the 🦇 midbrain contains spatially clustered neurons that categorize vocalizations, suggesting our brains may start making sense of communication sounds earlier in the auditory pathway❗️Kudos to Jenni for leading such exceptional work 👏🏽

This is basic science in a non-traditional species ... but it may have implications for speech processing in lower auditory areas in humans some day. See this short piece for my thoughts on discovery-based science, universities, and federal funding: t.co/jJgOOv9em6

Huge thanks to BRAIN initiative and NIH funding and to amazing collaborators, @cynthiamoss.bsky.social and Mel Wohlgemuth!

🦇👂🧠Our first bat paper is out! 🧠👂🦇
How do bats tell navigation from social calls?
Led by the fearless Dr. Jenni Lawlor, we used 2P imaging to show that the auditory midbrain encodes categorical primitives.
Check it out @natneuro.nature.com: rdcu.be/ehEgz

if you read, and say 'well but a lot of things can be better with federal funding or academia', I agree. but i also don't think we need to caveat everything each time we talk about the good that comes from universities

Wrote this short piece for our university newsletter (the Hub) in defense of curiosity and the partnership between Universities and federal government

Thrilled to share our work in ScienceAdvances: “Chronic ethanol exposure produces sex-dependent impairments in value computations in the striatum.” Huge thanks to Tricia @janaklab.bsky.social, Daeyeol @ungteoriz.bsky.social, Angela, and my friend Robin!
www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Researchers for first time use brain activity to determine why mice make mistakes.

Article link: tinyurl.com/bdcra73e

"We could tell if the animal was making a mistake or just wanted to give the other option a shot," says senior author Kishore Kuchibhotla. @kishoreneuro.bsky.social

Thanks Livia!

Thanks @ioanacarcea.bsky.social !!

TLDR, we propose that the sensory cortex is better described as a ‘sensory-enriched associative cortex’ whereby sensory, associative, and performance functions are intermingled (i.e. co-existing in the same network and neurons) but are computationally separable

Thrilled to share the latest paper from the lab! Huge congrats to first author Dr. Celine Drieu and the amazing team of Ziyi Zhu, Sarah Elnozahy, Joy Wang, Aaron Wang, and Kylie Fuller! Lots of fun stuff in the paper so check it out - and let us know what you think :)

4/ We trained mice on a modified auditory go/no-go task that uses simple pure tone cues (to avoid complex/perceptual processing by the auditory cortex) that allows us to dissociate rapid learning (acquisition of contingencies) from slower performance gains 🐭📈

3/ But anyone who has trained animals in the lab (or pets at home!) probably has had the intuition that they sometimes know more than they let on🤔

2/ We often equate learning and performance in the lab leading to the view that learning even simple sensorimotor tasks can take forever. This slow learning is thought to be supported by a gradual expansion of predictive cue representation in the sensory cortex

1/ A century ago, Tolman showed that meaningful learning can occur even without apparent performance improvements. What is the neural basis of this distinction between learning something vs learning to perform? We tackle this in a new manuscript 🔥 🐭🔬📰

Visit our new courses calendar, where we highlight the top neuroscience courses that should be on your radar. You can filter your search by topic.

www.thetransmitter.org/courses/?utm...

#neuroskyence