Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

SchottdorfLab

@schottdorflab.bsky.social

130 followers 220 following 12 posts

We are a quantitative behavioral neuroscience lab at the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. http://www.schottdorflab.com PI: Manuel Schottdorf

www.schottdorflab.com

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Nov 24

Have you ever wondered how and why learning abstract things can literally change how we see the world? We'll start digging into this beginning Jan 1 2025 at @udelaware.bsky.social's department of Psychological & Brain Sciences! More infos on schottdorflab.com

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Marius Schneider @mariusschneider.bsky.social · 16d

🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE!

We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like.

Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge!

Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

Mouse vs. AI: A Neuroethological Benchmark for Visual Robustness and Neural Alignment

Visual robustness under real-world conditions remains a critical bottleneck for modern reinforcement learning agents. In contrast, biological systems such as mice show remarkable resilience to environ...

arxiv.org

3 20 37

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · 5d

From the popular series "Figures that look like Kraftwerk Albums". Fig. 3 in Georgopoulos et al. Science 1986. Contributions of individual neurons to a shared coding direction in state space — pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3749885/

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · 7d

Using calcium imaging with single cell resolution across brain areas while mice solve two VR navigation problems, we discovered that neural manifolds can change in size based on working memory demands! Check out Mika Diamanti's amazing work: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Working memory expands shared task representations in cortex

Cognition is thought to emerge from the flexible organization of neural activity, yet how this organization reconfigures across behaviors varying in cognitive load remains unclear. We investigated how...

www.biorxiv.org

2 5

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 8d

Working memory expands shared task representations in cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679345v1

2 3

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Thomas Luo @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social · 21d

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature

Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

www.nature.com

14 96 250

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · 23d

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS!

@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social
@cellpress.bsky.social

By me +
Hanna Hillman

We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue

Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

6 34 88

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Kanaka Rajan @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social · 26d

(1/8) New paper from our team!

Yu Duan & Hamza Chaudhry introduce POCO, a tool for predicting brain activity at the cellular & network level during spontaneous behavior.

Find out how we built POCO & how it changes neurobehavioral research 👇

arxiv.org/abs/2506.14957

1 14 49

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Sep 8

Hm. yesss. Great Nerd Sniping potential to do the math for TCRM. My hunch is that Eq. (2) in arxiv.org/html/2504.02... could be a great starting point to add the Dxy constraint. Would be a super cool extension of CRM

arxiv.org

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Sep 5

Our latest project find shared representations while controlling for confounds is out www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Check @s-michelmann.bsky.social 's thread for the executive summary. Code in python and matlab: github.com/s-michelmann... — Now is play time 👨‍💻

| bioRxiv

bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

www.biorxiv.org

2 8

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Sebastian Michelmann @s-michelmann.bsky.social · Sep 5

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

1 30 78

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Sep 5

Hi Harrison, this would be hard to compare; you would need some sort of regularization for PSL. The secret sauce of CRM is this regularization. Without it, it's just plain old CCA.

2 1

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

America's Lab @americas-lab.bsky.social · May 21

Wonder what kind of innovations publicly funded science has generated? Look no further than the device you may be reading this post on! Touchscreens started as a NSF funded thesis project at the University of Delaware. Learn more at:

publicusaresearchbenefits.com/examples/202...

Touchscreens

An NSF-funded graduate fellowship changed smartphones all over the world

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

4 6

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

America's Lab @americas-lab.bsky.social · May 24

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

please re-post so we get more great stories in there!

Searchable database of tangible benefits that federally-funded research gave us.

A crowd-sourced site. Health and Well-being. National Security. Prosperity.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

11 8

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Kanaka Rajan @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social · Mar 28

Big showing from the Rajan Lab at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social!

We have posters on everything from multi-agent social foraging to neuromodulated neural networks. Catch us in Poster Sessions 2 & 3 🧠🤖

#Cosyne2025 #NeuroAI #CompSci #neuroskyence

COSYNE 2025 Rajan lab posters.
Friday, March 28 - Poster Session 2:
2-043: Emergent small-group foraging under variable group size, food scarcity, and sensory capabilities by Zhouyang (Hanson) Lu, Satpreet H Singh, Sonja Johnson-Yu, Aaron Walsman, Kanaka Rajan
2-058: 'Modeling rapid neuromodulation in the cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus loop' by Julia Costacurta and Yu Duan (co-first), John Assad, Kanaka Rajan and Scott Linderman (co-senior)
2-060: 'Measuring and Controlling Solution Degeneracy across Task-Trained RNNs' by Ann Huang, Satpreet Singh, Kanaka Rajan

Saturday, March 29 - Poster Session 3:

3-020: 'ForageWorld: RL agents in complex foraging arenas develop internal maps for navigation and planning' by Ryan Badman, Riley Simmons-Edler, Joshua Lunger, John Vastola, William Qian, Kanaka Rajan
3-109: 'Inhibition-stabilized disordered dynamics in mouse cortex during navigational decision-making' by Siyan Zhou, Ryan Badman, Charlotte Arlt, Kanaka Rajan, Christopher Harvey

9 37

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Matthijs van der Meer @mvandermeer.bsky.social · Mar 27

New opinion paper in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social with Dan Bendor, where we argue that rodent studies provide only marginal support for the idea that replay supports real-time decisions (e.g. planning). Fictive learning and memory tagging are more consistent w/evidence. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Awake replay: off the clock but on the job

Hippocampal replay is widely thought to support two key cognitive functions: online decision-making and offline memory consolidation. In this review, we take a closer look at the hypothesized link bet...

www.cell.com

1 23 55

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Mar 21

Fascinating article!

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Mar 18

Great! Please let me know if you need any help. We built a little model too (code is in the same repo) but nothing as sophisticated as what you guys are going. Looking forward to seeing how well you'll do with natural scenes from the primate fovea in vivo :-)

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Mar 15

Great initiative! We have published a dataset a few years ago with in vivo recordings in macaques to natural scenes close to the fovea. Could be useful: doi.org/10.12751/g-n... — I don't do much work in this field anymore, but if it is not too much work, I can try to reformat this.

G-Node Open Data: Macaque retinal ganglion cell responses to natural movies in vivo.

doi.org

1 2

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · Feb 20

Scientific data and independence are at risk: We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political interference.

By @neuralreckoning.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/policy/scien...

Science must step away from nationally managed infrastructure

Scientific data and independence are at risk. We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political…

www.thetransmitter.org

1 37 86

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Feb 16

Do you want to build your own two photon microscope for in vivo imaging? We have made our design open: With complete building instructions, bill of materials, CAD designs — and even the optics simulations. Now peer reviewed: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Peter Rupprecht @ptrrupprecht.bsky.social · Feb 13

How to guide a micropipette into mouse hippocampus using two-photon microscopy - great protocol paper by Kevin Gonzalez and the Losonczy Lab: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

2 9

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

HHMI @hhmi.org · Feb 13

Mapmaking in the mind: new research details how the brain builds mental maps of the world

To see how cognitive maps form in the brain, researchers used a Janelia-designed, high-resolution microscope with a large field of view to image neural activity in thousands of neurons in the

www.janelia.org

1 3

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Christopher Langdon @cmlangdon.bsky.social · Feb 12

(1/5) Excited to share my work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social , out now in Nat Neuro! We show that RNNs use low-d latent circuit mechanisms for cognitive tasks. We find that context-dependent decisions in both RNNs and PFC arise from latent inhibitory mechanisms. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Latent circuit inference from heterogeneous neural responses during cognitive tasks - Nature Neuroscience

The latent circuit model identifies low-dimensional mechanisms of task execution from heterogenous neural responses. This approach reveals a latent inhibitory mechanism for context-dependent decisions...

www.nature.com

2 15 46

SchottdorfLab @schottdorflab.bsky.social · Feb 11

oh wow! Well, if you ever find yourself wondering how to build one yourself, here are the instructions: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 😄 Now accepted and in print!

Reposted by SchottdorfLab

Peter Rupprecht @ptrrupprecht.bsky.social · Jan 31

Cool experimental design by @simwieg.bsky.social's lab with optogenetics + calcium imaging: how place cells in CA1 are affected by stimulation of contralateral CA3. They observe less an induction of place fields but somewhat random shifts of existing place fields: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Screenshot from Fig. 1c of the paper in the link.

1 2 8