Francesco Poli

This was fun!! Thanks so much for having me over :)

This Wednesday! I will be talking about curiosity in infants, children, adults (and artifcial neural networks)

Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions | PNAS Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Exploration Patterns in Spontaneous Self-Touch Actions in Infancy Infants frequently touch their own bodies from the earliest months of life, raising questions about whether these self-directed actions reflect active body exploration. We hypothesize that infants’ se...

We have a new conference paper out just now! How do infants explore their own body? We show that in the first weeks of life, infants' self-touch actions allow them to gain information about their own body. ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112...

It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function The authors review evidence that the primary function of the brain, supported by distributed neural systems, is the predictive regulation of physiology (i.e., allostasis). An example from Alzheimer’s ...

It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
#neuroscience

𝗔 𝗡𝗘𝗨𝗥𝗢𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗚𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟 𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗘𝗫
By Mars and Passingham
"Understanding anthropoid foraging challenges may thus contribute to our understanding of human cognition"
Going to the top of the reading list!
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#neuroskyence

"If we believe in democratic order, let us put science and knowledge back at the heart of things, let us put scientific authority back at the heart of things, let us put culture, education and learning back at the heart of things..."

Macron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."

Why are we still sending our work to Wiley and other publishing companies so that they can profit from it? There's so many better options now, for example: psychopen.eu/journals/

Incredible study by Raut et al.: by tracking a single measure (pupil size), you can model slow, large-scale dynamics in neuronal calcium, metabolism, and brain blood oxygen through a shared latent space! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So cool!

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

If only unions existed/had power

📣📣📣 Hi Everyone! I'm accepting PhD students for the Fall 2026 cycle! Our lab topics include the developmental origins and elaboration of moral cognition/prosocial behavior, persistence, and optimism. More info below!!

it's a hyper capitalist racket, and the fact that ***academia*** (full of all those gigantic galaxy brains) collectively still hasn't managed to burn it to the fucking ground says a lot about how deep these exploitative structures run

so ORGANIZE

this is a labour issue - collectively, you are NOT powerless

stop upholding systems that exploit you, chew you up and spit you out ... and that steal and lock away the knowledge you create from the rest of us out here

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

@fluxsociety.bsky.social is there a lost and found at #Flux2025? I lost my coat and jumper during today's poster session. Thanks!

@sofiascatolin.bsky.social
💡 Parent-Child Functional Neural Similarity and Its Association With Child Mental Well-Being
📅 Saturday | Posters III
🕙 10:15–11:45AM | Goldsmith Hall
🎤 Flash talk: Saturday | 9:10–9:15AM | Hyde Suite 1&2
✨ As the Beatles sang: in the end, it’s all about the love we share

Interesting on how publishers respond when concerns are raised 👇 My own experience:

Springer, 3 journals, No action
Elsevier, 3, No action
CUP, 1, No action
Brill, 1, No action
Emerald, 1, No action
Frontiers, 1, No action
Qeios, No action
Cell Press, 1, Editorial note
Royal Society, 1, Retraction

This RedNote post shocked me today.

An anonymous user says they are going to upload 60 papers to arXiv soon and are looking for “citation partners” to boost citation counts together by citing each other.

Something is seriously wrong in the system of evaluating researchers by citation counts.

How is science fighting back against attacks in the US? The project @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social encourages researchers to publish in local newspapers in their hometowns. The goal: remind people of the value of science 👇
www.wissenschaftskommunikation.de/one-goal-is-...
#scicomm #wisskomm

It looks super interesting, can't wait to read it in detail. I really like this work too: proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/...
Would be curious to know what you think of it!

Great and detailed blog post on compositionality, written by Eric Elmoznino:

ericelmoznino.github.io/blog/2025/08...

#compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience

I mean, Trump has got everyone kissing his arse *by being an enemy*.

How do we imagine that kissing his arse will stop him being an enemy, when being an enemy is working so damn well for him?

Are we stupid? Are we even stupider than Donald Trump? Maybe we are.

Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked through a biologically inspired reinforcement learning model Nature Communications - Accurate future predictions are essential for guiding behavior, and disruptions in this process are associated with psychiatric disorders. Here the authors show that changes...

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf

TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Wow: tenure letter writers’ publication records (h-index) are better predictors of tenure decisions than candidates’ own publication record.

Yeah unfortunately it's a no-go. I always travel with a Palestinian flag to join rallies wherever I can, and I don't want to find out what would happen to me if I tried to get in the US with it. Also, boycotting Trump, I guess. But it's really sad.

Adapted from Fig. 1 from Kadiyala et al 2025.

Introducing five concepts from dynamical systems to decode developmental regulatory mechanisms, have a read! @perez-carrasco.bsky.social‬ @roederlab.bsky.social @mpipz.bsky.social This effort started in a morphogenesis meeting @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social‬ in 2023. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...