Corey Ziemba

Variations in neuronal selectivity create efficient representational geometries for perception Our visual capabilities depend on neural response properties in visual areas of our brains. Neurons exhibit a wide variety of selective response properties, but the reasons for this diversity are unkn...

In many brain areas, neuronal tuning is heterogeneous. But how does this diversity help behavior? We show how tuning diversity shapes representational geometry and boosts coding efficiency for perception in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(w/ @sueyeonchung.bsky.social&Tony Movshon)

Confirmation bias through selective readout of information encoded in human parietal cortex Nature Communications - People often discard incoming information when it contradicts their pre-existing beliefs about the world. Here, the authors show that this discarded information is precisely...

1/ New paper by Hame Park, (@AraziAyelet), Bharath Talluri, Marco Celotto, Stefano Panzeri, Alan Stocker & Tobias Donner published in Nature Communications – “Confirmation Bias through Selective Readout of Information Encoded in Human Parietal Cortex”: rdcu.be/etlR7. Here is a summary:

This project began after my move to NIH and has been an eye-opening synthesis of my and Silvia's previous work. Couldn't be prouder of the incredible work of my first trainee and first author Corey Plate, who has just left NIH to begin his MD/PhD!

A population representation of the confidence in a decision in the parietal cortex At the end of a decision based on evidence accumulation, the neural representation of the accumulation is invariant across decisions. Zylberberg and Shadlen show, nonetheless, that accuracy can be dec...

Happy to share our new paper exploring how the brain might represent decision confidence.

A population representation of the confidence in a decision in the parietal cortex: Cell Reports www.cell.com/cell-reports...

At #cosyne2025? Come to my poster tonight!

A bit delayed, but I'm happy to announce my first paper as a postdoc in the Jazayeri lab! We discuss recent insights into the neurobiology of timing and why timing is a useful platform to understand flexible control of behavior more generally. We hope the review is useful!

tinyurl.com/5n8yhxet

Individual variability of neural computations underlying flexible decisions - Nature Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among...

1/7 Our paper on individual variability in decision-making is finally out in @nature.com! Inspired by the classic work by Mante and Sussillo, we trained many rats to solve context-dependent decision-making, and we found that different brains use different neural mechanisms to solve the same task!

People talk a lot about objects, but what about the softness of a cushion, the greenness of an emerald, or the viscosity of oil? In our work just published @pnas.org, we shed light on how we make sense of the hundreds of materials around us.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I just wrote a book about how the type of work @markhisted.org is doing is key to breaking through the bottlenecks holding back new treatments for brain and mental disorders (from Alzheimers to depression). Seeing his work in danger makes me ill, and angry.

We must @standupforscience.bsky.social.

One of the NIMH PIs whose name is the termination list: Sooyhun Lee, whose lab just published this beautiful @nature.com paper (that has received too little press because comms at NIH are down). Read! Cite!

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

Brain-wide presynaptic networks of functionally distinct cortical neurons - Nature Behavioural-state-dependent pyramidal neurons have a distinct pattern of long-range glutamatergic inputs, with a larger proportion of thalamic versus motor cortex inputs compared with non-behavio...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... awesome new work out today! From the Lee lab in the intramural research program at NIMH!

Context-dependent decision-making in the primate hippocampal–prefrontal circuit - Nature Neuroscience The brain uses different valuation schemes across contexts. Elston and Wallis show this is supported by hippocampal encoding of context that is broadcast to prefrontal value subcircuits via theta sync...

Pleased to share the final version (out in @natureneuro.bsky.social ) of my recent project showing how the primate HPC and OFC interact during contextual reasoning!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A big thanks to the reviewers who made the paper better!

It's finally out!

Visual experience orthogonalizes visual cortical responses

Training in a visual task changes V1 tuning curves in odd ways. This effect is explained by a simple convex transformation. It orthogonalizes the population, making it easier to decode.

10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115235

Picture of neural manifolds for the two choices in a decision-making task, depicted in 3D and in 2D

New preprint: "The geometry of the neural state space of decisions", work by Mauro Monsalve-Mercado, buff.ly/42wVHD5. Surprising results & predictions! (Thread) We analyze neuropixel population recordings in macaque area LIP during a reaction time, random-dot motion 1/

🔵 NEW PAPER 🔵

Spatiotemporal Style Transfer #STST is out on #NatureComputationalScience!

STST as a framework for dynamic visual stimulus generation to study brain and machine vision

feat. @siegellab.bsky.social
paper: www.nature.com/articles/s43...
code: github.com/antoninogrec...

🧵👇

A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition - Nature Communications Measuring metacognitive ability is one of the enduring challenges in cognitive science. The current paper develops formal tests of the quality of different measures and assesses how current metrics pe...

My article "A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition" is finally out in Nature Communications 🎉 If you work on metacognition and think you know the psychometric properties of your favorite measure, you may be surprised.

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

The origin of color categories | PNAS To what extent does concept formation require language? Here, we exploit color to address this question and ask whether macaque monkeys have color ...

Great to start by sharing an exceptionally interesting paper on the origin of colour categories
Doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2400273121

Spiking activity in the monkey ventral stream in response to thousands of images.

An extensive dataset of spiking activity to reveal the syntax of the ventral stream - V1, V4, and IT neurons in monkeys viewing >25,000 natural images www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... by @paolopapale.bsky.social et al.; #BCI #NeuroTech #neuroscience

Linking neural population formatting to function Animals capable of complex behaviors tend to have more distinct brain areas than simpler organisms, and artificial networks that perform many tasks tend to self-organize into modules (1-3). This sugge...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵
#neuroskyence
1/

12 years in the making! I remember having long chats with Michael Oliver about this paper in 2012. Those are still some of the most comprehensive V4 recordings out there. So happy this is finally out.

How the human brain thinks about itself | Royal Society Royal Society Francis Crick Prize Lecture by Professor Stephen Fleming.

I'll be talking about all things metacognitive on 23rd Jan in a public lecture at the @royalsociety.org

It's free to attend and will also be broadcast live on the RS YouTube channel (no pressure then 😅)

royalsociety.org/science-even...

Leslie Ungerleider (1946 - 2020) was an extraordinary, pioneering neuroscientist. The latest issue of @jocn.bsky.social honors her legacy with articles authored by former colleagues & trainees that highlight critical aspects of her work and its influence https://buff.ly/4156UKw #cogsci #neuroscience

Big welcome to another neurosci. luminary, @eerosim.bsky.social.

Director of Computational Neuroscience at @simonsfoundation.org Flatiron Institute, NYU Professor, winner of many accolades, and overall great human who knows stuff and makes things happen.

Clear follow and starter pack addition!

🚨 PhD opportunity alert! 🚨

Join our lab @sidb-edinburgh.bsky.social in beautiful Edinburgh! We study the neural mechanisms underlying flexible decision-making using cutting-edge experimental and computational approaches.

We’re recruiting for two fully funded PhD positions. Details below 👇

I want to draw attention to a special issue that Lila Davachi and I put together to memorialize our friend and colleague Sarah DuBrow. It’s full of papers inspired by her work and her being from a group of collaborators, friends, and fans! Thanks @bradpostle.bsky.social for helping make this happen.

Neuroscientists reeling from past cuts advocate for more BRAIN Initiative funding The director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health calls BRAIN a “high priority” but acknowledges that difficult decisions lie ahead if federal budgets remain flat.

The director of the NIH calls the BRAIN Initiative a “high priority” but acknowledges that difficult decisions lie ahead if federal budgets remain flat.

By @avaskham.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/funding/neur...

Hidden state inference requires abstract contextual representations in the ventral hippocampus The ability to use subjective, latent contextual representations to influence decision-making is crucial for everyday life. The hippocampus is hypothesized to bind together otherwise abstract combinat...

Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7

Ventral frontostriatal circuitry mediates the computation of reinforcement from symbolic gains and losses Tang et al. show that OFC plays a more important role in learning from symbolic reinforcers than subcortical structures. OFC computes reinforcement signals and sends the information to the VS through ...

Our paper is published in the latest issue of NEURON. We examined the neural mechanisms involved in learning from the gains and losses of symbolic reinforcers in the ventral frontostriatal circuitry. 🧠
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

My lab has been working on comparing neural representations for the past few years - methods like RSA, CKA, CCA, Procrustes distance

We are often asked: What do these things tell us about the system's function? How do they relate to decoding?

Our new paper has some answers arxiv.org/abs/2411.08197

Home | The Visual Learning Lab at UCSD Lab webpage for the Visual Learning Lab at UCSD, lead by Dr. Bria Long, Ph.D. Launching in July 2024!

The Visual Learning Lab at UC San Diego is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow to join our lab!

Read more about our lab at www.vislearnlab.org