mike freund

I'm really curious what factors drive var(nTc). Both from basic perspective, but also from practical -- of someone that wants to put these dynamics under tighter experimental control / to have more certainty about what's happening when :)

It is so interesting that the nTc is so variable across trials.

But this is also sobering: clearly, time-aligned trial averaging has *deep* flaws -- yet so much of human cog neuro relies on it, due to unavailability of high-SNR recordings...

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...

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

AAUP-UC-Trump Lawsuit -- Uploaded by Jaweed Kaleem of the Los Angeles Times

I'd like to commend the lawyers who wrote this complaint on behalf of the professors and employees of the University of California against the Trump administration.

It's a sober legal document with strong claims, but also, this is a fight for public opinion, and this reads like the writers know it.

You sound like an all-American to me !

post-script: "all-american upbringing" seems to preclude this usage

i think it could have a variety of connotations (see other comments), but one dominant usage is in reference to being competitive in athletics or academics on national scale, a la en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Ame...

Q&A with Nico U.F. Dosenbach and Roselyne Chauvin Nico U.F. Dosenbach and Roselyne Chauvin spoke with Cell Reports about their recent paper, in which they observed subcortical plasticity in humans following a 2-week arm/hand-casting paradigm with dai...

Want to know the behind the scenes of the "Disuse-driven plasticity in the human thalamus and
putamen" paper? discover @ndosenbach.bsky.social and I interview by @cp-cellreports.bsky.social

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

…Btw I do not mean to suggest there is no worth to mixed-selective perspectives, or that they are wrong! Personally I have just struggled when thinking about how exactly to provide strong positive evidence for them. And curious to hear your perspective.

You can’t be, until you find one :) Its existence is not guaranteed. The same I do not think is true for the mixed basis case. IMO, this is what often makes it compelling when an interpretable factorized basis is identified.

Frontal cortex neuron types categorically encode single decision variables - Nature Frontal cortex neurons can be grouped into categorical response types corresponding to particular decision variables, such as reward size, decision confidence, or value, and individual variables may b...

What appears mixed and non-linear from one basis could be sparse & factorized from another. When you see mixed selectivity, how can you be confident that your basis isn't just wrong?
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Long-standing theoretical neuroscience fellowship program loses financial support Funding from the Swartz and Sloan Foundations helped bring physicists and mathematicians into neuroscience for more than 30 years.

I will always be grateful for the immense -- and unique -- contribution the Swartz Program made in supporting theoretical neuroscience over the past 30 years. Its closure leaves a profound void. doi.org/10.53053/FPR...

What is this, a fitness test for Presidents?

via Benedicto.Uribe on TikTok

The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world.
They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.

Fully agree. Our story feels incomplete to me without those things, but we simply had to get it out the door. But, I think Todd & co. are working on those follow-ups now!

of course, don't mean to imply that one method is better or more sensitive in general than the other (that depends on exp design & theoretical questions). just that they can be sensitive to different neural features.

:) Borne mostly from reflecting on reactions from family/friends ("you're STILL in school/a student?!") --- yes, aren't we all?

(...but correct me if i'm misremembering)
So the decoders we used didn't require the neural signatures to be aligned across subjects, but only across sessions w/in subject. Seems likely that at finer spatial scales, multi-subj decoders would lose sensitivity more quickly than subject-specific ones.

hey thanks for mentioning David! Interesting ideas in this thread. Yes we were able to identify relatively reliable signatures at the region level. One potentially relevant difference btw our studies: our decoders were subject-specific, whereas yours were fitted on data from multiple subjs, IIRC.

It's a demoralizing time to be a US scientist but that is part of their strategy. My friend Jeff Dangl just emailed our faculty reminding us that NSF and NIH grant review panels are still being held and staff there want us to keep submitting. Stay engaged and keep fighting! 1/n

Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we show how cognitive maps in the hippocampal system could solve the general problem of representing and relating multiple alternative action plans. 
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

With @doellerlab.bsky.social, Patrick Haggard, @vigano.bsky.social, Daniel Reznik

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 share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!

Neural and behavioral signatures of policy compression in cognitive control Making context-dependent decisions incurs cognitive costs. Cognitive control studies have investigated the nature of such costs from both computational and neural perspectives. In this paper, we offer...

New work by @liushuze.bsky.social establishes an empirical link between policy complexity and neural dimensionality:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Against Language Barriers: A Call to Protect International Education in Dutch Academia

An open letter supporting the international bachelor’s psychology programs threatened for cuts. Proceeding with these cuts would damage some of the most important and impactful psychology departments globally. #supportdutchpsychology

openletter.earth/against-lang...

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

I got an email yesterday afternoon that my NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship was terminated. My grant focused on testing interventions to address online misinformation and I was 8 months into a two year appointment.

was it at least a good anova?

beautiful, heartbreaking words in this judge's rejection of trump's request

The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.

Pardons tho