Roxana Zeraati
@roxana-zeraati.bsky.social
1.4K followers 610 following 53 posts
In search of computational principles of natural adaptive behavior. Postdoc with Peter Dayan @mpicybernetics.bsky.social Website: http://roxanazeraati.org/
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roxana-zeraati.bsky.social
My PhD journey has officially come to end with a Summa Cum Laude, thanks to all the amazing people who’ve supported me along the way, especially my advisors Anna Levina and @engeltatiana.bsky.social!
Which apparently coincided with graduation from a witchcraft and wizardry school 😉

#neuroskyence
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
kathaschmack.bsky.social
Dear Student,

It has been wonderful to see you grow from a lab novice into a thoughtful experimentalist. The results you have generated rob me of sleep because I am so excited thinking about the potential that lies in them. Science can be exhilarating! (1/4)
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
lauragrima.bsky.social
A little backstory on this one: sometime during the pandemic @hannah-haberkern.bsky.social and I were chatting in the servery at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social about how to encourage interactions between people working on foraging (+ neuroscience) across different species and perspectives... 1/n
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
lauragrima.bsky.social
Plus, there's now a related conference organized by some wonderful people @unibirmingham.bsky.social in the UK, including @brainapps.bsky.social, @markdhumphries.bsky.social, and others. (Registration for this conference is still open until the 20th October!) uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...
Home - The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging
uobevents.eventsair.com
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
mschrimpf.bsky.social
A glimpse at what #NeuroAI brain models might enable: a topographic vision model predicts stimulation patterns that steer complex object recognition behavior in primates. This could be a key 'software' component for visual prosthetic hardware 🧠🤖🧪
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
mschrimpf.bsky.social
I've been arguing that #NeuroAI should model the brain in health *and* in disease -- very excited to share a first step from Melika Honarmand: inducing dyslexia in vision-language-models via targeted perturbations of visual-word-form units (analogous to human VWFA) 🧠🤖🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2509.24597
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
charlottevolk.bsky.social
🚨 New preprint alert!

🧠🤖
We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up.
🧠📈

A 🧵:

tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3
The curriculum effect in visual learning: the role of readout dimensionality
Generalization of visual perceptual learning (VPL) to unseen conditions varies across tasks. Previous work suggests that training curriculum may be integral to generalization, yet a theoretical explan...
tinyurl.com
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
cmc-lab.bsky.social
Don't miss our posters at #BernsteinConference 😍
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
wlallen.bsky.social
📢🦋 Our paper ‘Global selection on insect antipredator coloration’ is out and featured on the cover of @science.org

We ran a huge experiment to find out how ecological context favours camouflage and warning colouration as antipredator strategies. 1/6

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
A white-fronted bee-eater (Merops bullockoides) decides whether to consume a warningly colored white-barred acraea butterfly (Telchinia encedon). Photo (c) Mike Rowe
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
neuroprinciplist.bsky.social
Very much look forward to our workshop (co-organized with @armanbehrad.bsky.social) today with a great lineup of speakers who combine a wide spectrum of approaches and methods to have a joint definition of brain-behavior state!

bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co...

#BernsteinConference
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
armanbehrad.bsky.social
What defines a brain state? 🧠
If you are also interested in answering this question, join us in "Toward a joint definition of neural-behavioral states", #BernsteinConference full-day workshop, Co-orgnized by @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social and I. (1/4)
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
armanbehrad.bsky.social
🚀 Curious about neural-behavioral states?
Join us at the Bernstein Satellite Workshop (Monday, Sep 29) and explore cutting-edge ideas with us!
👉 bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co...
(SW2025) Toward a joint definition of neural-behavioral states – Bernstein Netzwerk Computational Neuroscience
bernstein-network.de
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
modirshanechi.bsky.social
New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
zamakany.bsky.social
Proud of my PhD student @rodento.bsky.social for her first study on the effect of environmental structure on social phenotype of desert locusts.

An amazing collaboration with @einatcouzin.bsky.social , who got me to work on locusts.

You want to know more: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
katrinvogt.bsky.social
How is valence computed in the brain? Check out our new preprint about a single cell that integrates excitatory and inhibitory input across modalities according to valence and impacts behavioral decisions. An exciting collaboration across many labs. Enjoy reading!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A multisensory, bidirectional, valence encoder guides behavioral decisions
A key function of the brain is to categorize sensory cues as repulsive or attractive and respond accordingly. While we have some understanding of how sensory information is processed in the sensory pe...
www.biorxiv.org
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
endoeartha.bsky.social
Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice!

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

#neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪
1/12
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
cmc-lab.bsky.social
Oops, wrong time in the original post! It will be 15:30 CET 😉
cmc-lab.bsky.social
In our Learning Club @cmc-lab.bsky.social today (Sep 25, Thu, 2pm CET), @dengpan.bsky.social will tell us about his recent paper (👇) [joint work w/ Rushworth lab]. Want to attend, send an empty email to [email protected] to get the link!
dengpan.bsky.social
🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
cmc-lab.bsky.social
In our Learning Club @cmc-lab.bsky.social today (Sep 25, Thu, 2pm CET), @dengpan.bsky.social will tell us about his recent paper (👇) [joint work w/ Rushworth lab]. Want to attend, send an empty email to [email protected] to get the link!
dengpan.bsky.social
🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
kristorpjensen.bsky.social
I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
rdgao.bsky.social
I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real:

I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job!

I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math

and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗
a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window
ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window
media.tenor.com
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
marius10p.bsky.social
New work from the lab, mismatch responses consistent with spatial but not temporal predictive coding theory.
qqzhang.bsky.social
Does predictive coding work in SPACE or in TIME? Most neuroscientists assume TIME, i.e. neurons predict their future sensory inputs. We show that in visual cortex predictive coding actually works across SPACE, just like the original Rao+Ballard theory #neuroscience
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
Reposted by Roxana Zeraati
neurovenki.bsky.social
(edited repost) Thrilled to see our computational work on adaptive shaping of behavior (we call it outcome-based curriculum learning) in PLoS Comp Biol! @wl-tong.bsky.social, @gautamreddy.bsky.social & I formalize curricula in any RL task that can be framed as sequential simple-to-complex behavior.
Adaptive algorithms for shaping behavior
Author summary Animals are commonly trained by ‘shaping’ their behavior using a sequence of simpler tasks towards a complex behavior. Numerous schools of thought have proposed heuristics for shaping b...
journals.plos.org