Carsen Stringer

Dopamine encodes deep network teaching signals for individual learning trajectories Longitudinal tracking of long-term learning behavior and striatal dopamine reveals that dopamine teaching signals shape individually diverse yet systematic learning trajectories, captured mathematical...

Super excited to see this paper from Armin Lak & colleagues out! (I've seen @saxelab.bsky.social present it before.)

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

tl;dr: The learning trajectories that individual mice take correspond to different saddle points in a deep net's loss landscape.

🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

Top left: A magellanic penguin in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Image credit: Unsplash user William Warby. Top right: The GPS-corrected dead-reckoned tracks of 27 penguins at sea, colored to distinguish between the outbound (red) and inbound (blue) phases of their foraging trips. Bottom: A ‘snapshot’ of the current conditions within the grid area, showing peak tidal strength during a single day as a function of the tidal cycle, including the outgoing (‘ebb’ – left panel) and incoming (‘flood’ – right panel) tides. Penguins are often subjected to strong cross-currents during these phases. The colony location is marked by a small black filled circle with a white outline.

How can magellanic #penguins navigate tidal currents while balancing #EnergyEfficiency & foraging opportunities? This study reveals how they adaptively make S-shaped return paths to their colony, optimizing travel in complex oceanic flows @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/40nKyD4

Beautiful work! Very cool that the cancelation of self-generated motion seems to rely on proprioception rather than efference copy.
Electric fish seem to also use proprioceptive signals for their own cancelation of posture-specific sensory cues (www.cell.com/neuron/fullt....

Screenshot of the top of the article, including the title, authors, and abstract.

What’s better than a one-channel #Miniscope? 🥁 A TWO-CHANNEL Miniscope!

Our new Miniscope2C is a dual-channel, open-source Miniscope that lets you record 2 fluorescent signals simultaneously in freely moving animals.

Read the paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

(1/10)

I'm a professor at the flagship university for the fourth whitest state in the US. Over 80% of our students are white.

The biggest barrier to access here is that due to lack of state funding, we have top 10 highest tuition per capita of public unis in the country.

We also have a food pantry.

About 84% of students attend colleges that are considered “non selective”. If these dudes really wanted to improve access they would push to make public universities free. These dudes don't want more students attending public colleges. They want universities to keep certain people out.

Potential role of developmental experience in the emergence of the parvo-magno distinction - Communications Biology Developmentally-driven computational modeling study suggests that early sensory experience shapes distinct neuronal response properties in the visual system, providing a potential account of the emerg...

1/ New paper out in @commsbio.nature.com, led by @marinv.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1038/s420...! Across several past studies, we showed how newborns' degraded vision may benefit human development and inspire more robust deep networks. We have referred to this as Adaptive Initial Degradations (AID).

A summary figure for a NeurIPS competition where AI agents compete with mice in a visual foraging task.

Mice learn these tasks and are robust to perturbations like fog. Now, we invite you all to make AI agents to beat mice.

We present our #NeurIPS competition. You can learn about it here: robustforaging.github.io (7/n)

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions.

Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy

arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

New by Agnès Landemard (@agnesland.bsky.social‬) & co

Brainwide blood volume reflects opposing neural populations

Brainwide fluctuations in blood volume arise from two populations with opposite relation to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply

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

🔬API-first feature extraction for image-based profiling workflows

If you need to obtain interpretable features from your segmented microscopy images, but want to do it in a fully automated way, we know the struggle.

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I would love (and am trying) to build a whole lab off of data reuse + modeling. This article pointed to some useful resources I hadn't heard of.

I would also add that reuse can be for things far afield from what the data was originally collected for. Your data may have value you've never dreamt of!

Yes! Sharing neural recordings improves reproducibility and transparency, and reduces the need for new experiments - we should value it. And reuse is really happening: @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social's datasets (highlighted) have over 80k downloads! 🔥 figshare.com/authors/Nick...

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...

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...

(1/7) New preprint from Rajan lab! 🧠🤖
@ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social & Riley Simmons-Edler show–through cog sci, neuro & ethology–how an AI agent with fewer ‘neurons’ than an insect can forage, find safety & dodge predators in a virtual world. Here's what we built

Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06981

Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...

Elon Musk casually, and illegally, dismantled USAID. According to a new study in the Lancet, that action will lead to *14 million* premature deaths between 2025 and 2030.

Again: Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children.

💻A new class of simplified ‘minimodels’ developed by Fengtong Du, Miguel Angel Núñez-Ochoa, @marius10p.bsky.social & @computingnature.bsky.social can predict the visual responses of individual neurons in the primary visual cortex, helping shed light on how we see.👀
➡️ www.janelia.org/news/new-com...

Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning vs. Biological Learning, Large Language Models | Marius Pachitariu | 235 Mind & Matter · Episode

you can also listen to @marius10p.bsky.social discussing this work on the Mind & Matter podcast open.spotify.com/episode/7uFx...

and @zhong-lin.bsky.social shared all his large-scale neural recordings - over 400gb with millions of neurons + code to recreate all the analyses and figures: janelia.figshare.com/articles/dat... ; github.com/MouseLand/zh...

Doing This Might Actually Make You Smarter You’re scrolling through TikTok with the sound off. Waiting in line for a coffee. Watching a guy try to parallel park for the third time...

Doing this might make you smarter ... (www.vice.com/en/article/d...) News coverage of our study on unsupervised learning in mice by @zhong-lin.bsky.social + @marius10p.bsky.social

#neuroscience #AI
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔬👨‍💻📰 #SReD is out!
Automated structural detection for #ImageJ & #FIJI, from nano to macro ✨🐘. No training data, no bias - texture analysis with GPU acceleration!⚡️
Brainchild of @afonsomendes92.bsky.social and adventure w @christlet.bsky.social lab + friends.

Check: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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)

Exciting new work from Mireille Kamariza and coworkers @uclaengineering.bsky.social, a rapid, point of care TB drug sensitivity test based on DMN-trehalose labeling 👏

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

EBV is a leading cause of Multiple Sclerosis. Still, some people say, oh, if it is a virus that 90% of the population has, there is nothing we can do about it.
Wrong, we can do a lot to prevent the virus from damaging the brain. But all under development *while virology research is under attack*

We are learning all the time, even when you think you are not.

Your brain learns for you even when you're not actively learning. Maybe. (in mice).

High–resolution laminar recordings reveal structure–function relationships in monkey V1 The relationship between the structural properties of diverse neuronal populations in the monkey primary visual cortex (V1) and their functional visual processing in vivo remains a critical knowledge ...

On behalf of Nicole Carr: new preprint from the Chand/Moore labs! High-resolution laminar recordings reveal structure-function relationships in monkey V1.

1/4

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

Excited to share my PhD paper! In it, we use targeted 2-photon optogenetic stimulation to determine how V1 activity is read-out in a detection task. We found that network influence, not visual coding properties, predicted the impact of ensembles on behavior - contradicting our expectations (1/5).

RESULT: Nicusor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucarest, will be the next president of Romania.

A big loss for the far-right: its candidate George Simion got 41% in round one, but didn’t grow enough, & turnout surging worked against him. Simion is down 54.3% to 45.7% with 96% reporting.

Van Hollen: The U.S. Is 'Complicit' in Starving the People of Gaza Sen. Chris Van Hollen said the blocking of food and aid into Gaza is "collective punishment" and called on Trump to ask Israel to lift their blockade.

The vast majority of people in Gaza — 93 percent — are facing crisis levels of food insecurity, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen said that the United States is “complicit” in their hunger.