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Reposted by Paul Masset

Anna Weinberg @annaweinberg.bsky.social · 15d

Delighted to share that we are currently hiring for a tenure-track position (open rank) in Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. Come join a great department! Link to apply: mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/mcgill....

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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 19d

This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful.

When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"

Malcolm Campbell @malcolmgcampbell.bsky.social · 19d

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning?

Read on to find out more! 🧵

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Guillaume Viejo @guillaumeviejo.bsky.social · 22d

Finally preprinted! TL;DR: thalamic head-direction neurons can shape their activity regardless of input. Big thanks to @apeyrache.bsky.social and master experimentalist @sskromne.bsky.social .

Adrien Peyrache @apeyrache.bsky.social · 22d

🚨New preprint alert!

The thalamus has long been seen as a relay of sensory signals to cortex.
But could it also generate its own structured activity?
Our study explores this question in the head-direction (HD) system.

Some explanation 🧵👇 1/13

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Coherent dynamics of thalamic head-direction neurons irrespective of input

While the thalamus is known to relay and modulate sensory signals to the cortex, whether it also participates in active computation and intrinsic signal generation remains unresolved. The anterodorsal...

www.biorxiv.org

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Adrien Peyrache @apeyrache.bsky.social · 27d

Stoked to see this paper finally out!

It answers two big questions: where visual objects are encoded in the brain, and how head-direction cells get oriented using visual landmarks.

Super fun collaboration with @mace-lab.bsky.social and Stuart Trenholm.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Andrew Iwaniuk @evoneuro.bsky.social · Sep 4

For anyone on the neuroscience job market, our ads are up. We are looking for anyone working in systems neuroscience of animals to join us in southern Alberta 🇨🇦
#academicsky #neuroskyence #neuroethology #academicjobs #Canada
neurojobs.sfn.org/job/39049/as...

Assistant Professor (Neuroscience, Tenure Track) - Lethbridge (City), Alberta (CA) job with University of Lethbridge | 39049

Assistant Professor (tenure track) of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

neurojobs.sfn.org

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Brokoslaw Laschowski @drlaschowski.bsky.social · Sep 5

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience.

#neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

Professor - Computational Cognitive Neuroscience

jobs.utoronto.ca

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Jacob Zavatone-Veth @jzv.bsky.social · Sep 4

Since I'm back on BlueSky - with @frostedblakess.bsky.social and @cpehlevan.bsky.social we wrote a brief perspective on how ideas about summary statistics from the statistical physics of learning could potentially help inform neural data analysis... (1/2)

Frontiers | Summary statistics of learning link changing neural representations to behavior

How can we make sense of large-scale recordings of neural activity across learning? Theories of neural network learning with their origins in statistical phy...

www.frontiersin.org

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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Sep 1

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies

Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

www.biorxiv.org

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The Viking (Gunnar Blohm) @gunnarblohm.bsky.social · Aug 26

Having fun facilitating this amazing group of young Profs at the #Neuro4Pros workshop with @kordinglab.bsky.social and @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and Hannah Bayer.

Watch out world: this is the next generation of leaders!

compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...

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Andrew Iwaniuk @evoneuro.bsky.social · Aug 20

For anyone interested in an academic job in 🇨🇦, we will soon be advertising an Assistant Prof position in Systems Neuroscience (rodents and other animal models) at ULethbridge. There are many pros and cons of working here, so feel free to DM me to find out more
#neuroskyence #academicsky

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Sandra Romero Pinto @sromeropinto.bsky.social · Aug 13

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf

TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked through a biologically inspired reinforcement learning model

Nature Communications - Accurate future predictions are essential for guiding behavior, and disruptions in this process are associated with psychiatric disorders. Here the authors show that changes...

rdcu.be

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Matt Perich @mattperich.bsky.social · Aug 13

🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.

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Payam Piray @payampiray.bsky.social · Aug 12

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex.
rdcu.be/eAofi

Reconciling flexibility and efficiency: medial entorhinal cortex represents a compositional cognitive map

Nature Communications - How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a...

rdcu.be

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Malcolm Campbell @malcolmgcampbell.bsky.social · Aug 7

Our paper on foraging is now published in Neuron! Read it here:

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

This project was co-led by Michael Bukwich (not on Bluesky) and me, with major contributions from all co-authors. Huge thanks to the whole team!

Competitive integration of time and reward explains value-sensitive foraging decisions and frontal cortex ramping dynamics

Bukwich and Campbell et al. show that mice integrate elapsed time and reward intake, scaled by a latent patience variable, to decide when to leave virtual “patches.” Frontal cortex ramping activity ma...

www.cell.com

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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · Aug 4

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online:
www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han...

Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

Handbook of Behavioral Neuroscience | Volume 32: The Handbook of Dopamine | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier

Read the latest chapters of Handbook of Behavioral Neuroscience at ScienceDirect.com, Elsevier’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature

www.sciencedirect.com

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Matt Perich @mattperich.bsky.social · Jul 29

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world!

🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience

Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

www.nature.com

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Anna Beyeler 🐝 @anna-beyeler.bsky.social · Jul 10

👨‍💻 Open PI position in our institute 👨‍💻 !! If you are an expert in Computational Neuroscience and want to start your lab in Bordeaux, contact us !
www.fens.org/careers/job-...
@neuromagendie.bsky.social
@neurobordeaux.bsky.social

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Marcelo Mattar @marcelomattar.bsky.social · Jul 2

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature

Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

doi.org

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Justus Kebschull @justuskebschull.bsky.social · Jun 26

Excited to share the first 2(!) preprints from the Kebschull Lab. The amazing @hyopilkim.bsky.social developed MAPseq2 & POINTseq and used them to map the dopaminergic cells of VTA and SNc. tl;dr MAPseq2=10x cheaper, 4x better; POINTseq=easy cell type specific barcoding; DA neurons=very cool.

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Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · Jun 23

Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall!

My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵

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Mari Sosa @marisosa.bsky.social · Jun 12

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵

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

A flexible hippocampal population code for experience relative to reward - Nature Neuroscience

Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...

www.nature.com

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Armin Lak @laklab.bsky.social · Jun 11

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

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Caroline Menard @caromenard666.bsky.social · Jun 5

And one more again at McGill in artificial intelligence in Psychiatry

can-acn.org/assistant-pr...

Assistant Professor (Research), Department of Psychiatry, Artificial Intelligence in Psychiatry, McGill University – Canadian Association for Neuroscience

can-acn.org

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Dane Carnegie Malenfant @dvnxmvlhdf5.bsky.social · Jun 5

Preprint Alert 🚀

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) often assumes that agents know when other agents cooperate with them. But for humans, this isn’t always the case. For example, plains indigenous groups used to leave resources for others to use at effigies called Manitokan.
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Manitokan are images set up where one can bring a gift or receive a gift. 1930s Rocky Boy Reservation, Montana, Montana State University photograph. Colourized with AI

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Paul Masset @paulmasset.bsky.social · Jun 4

To conclude our study establishes a new paradigm to understand the functional role of prediction error computation in dopaminergic neurons and opens new avenues to develop mechanistic explanations for deficits in intertemporal choice in disease and inspire the design of new RL algorithms.

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