de Gee lab

Its a new term and a lot of us are preparing their lectures. I am a huge fan of online ways of teaching. And my student Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social made a great online stats course. Shiny app and all. Modern take on stats. Thought some of you may appreciate.

Are you at @assc28.bsky.social #ASSC28? On Wednesday I will present a poster on the causal relationship between choice history biases and catecholamines (noradrenaline / dopamine). With @donnerlab.bsky.social et al.

Are you at @assc28.bsky.social #ASSC28? Later, @stijnnuiten.bsky.social will present exciting cross-species results on the interaction between latent behavioral states, pupil-linked arousal, and V1 activity. Great collab w/ @psterzer.bsky.social @svangaal.bsky.social @pennartz.bsky.social et al.

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...

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:

A progressive ratio task with costly resets reveals adaptive effort-delay tradeoffs The Progressive Ratio (PR) schedule is a popular test for measuring the motivational value of a reinforcer, in which subjects must exert an increasing amount of work to obtain each successive reward. ...

This is a super cool way of studying learning, effort, and foraging www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Abstract rule learning promotes cognitive flexibility in complex environments across species - Nature Communications Whether neurocomputational mechanisms that speed up human learning in changing environments also exist in other species remains unclear. Here, the authors show that both rats and humans sequentially t...

Abstract rule learning promotes cognitive flexibility in complex environments across species
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

A causal role of the NMDA receptor in recurrent processing during perceptual integration Memantine selectively improves neural decoding of attended illusory contours, revealing NMDA receptor-dependent enhancement of feedback processing in human visual perception.

We show that memantine selectively improves neural decoding of attended illusory Kanizsa triangles, revealing NMDA receptor-dependent enhancement of feedback processing.

elifesciences.org/articles/100...

Thanks to Samuel Noorman @fahrenfort.bsky.social @timostein.bsky.social Jasper Zantvoord

A plot showing that taVNS does not induce larger pupil dilation compared to sham.

A plot showing that sham-induced pupil dilation is much more variable

Pulsed taVNS elicits pupil dilation. However, if sham feels as intense, there is not much left. Based on our comparatively large sample (94 participants, single-blind crossover), we show that a highly variable sham response explains this.
#neuroskyence 🩺
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hard agree. Great article on a timely issue by @neuralreckoning.bsky.social for @thetransmitter.bsky.social

To celebrate the defence of my PhD, and thanks to
@ibbamsterdam.bsky.social, I will host a symposium titled "Vision as prediction: learning, action, and biases" on June 6. Program, registration and more information here: bit.ly/43reOgR

Vacancy — PhD candidate in Neuroscience of Statistical Learning in Health and Disease Most of our decisions are guided by predictions—for instance, opting for a bike over a bus based on expected travel time and weather. However, unexpected changes, such as roadworks causing delays, can...

New PhD vacancy in my lab: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies.... The position involves interacting with patients, so *proficiency in Dutch* is essential. Please spread the word!

⚠️ Come see our new preprint, in which we (@degeelab.bsky.social, Jasper Zantvoord, @psterzer.bsky.social, @fahrenfort.bsky.social & @svangaal.bsky.social) show that phasic (task-evoked) and tonic (baseline) arousal distinctly shape human decision bias! (1/6)

dx.doi.org/10.21203/rs....

Jeremiah Cohen standing in front of a giant green neuron.

THIS IS ONE NEURON! Jaw dropping.

It distributes a particular neurotransmitter (norepinephrine) across the mouse brain; it’s a locus coeruleus neuron.

@jeremiahycohen.bsky.social and colleagues at the @alleninstitute.bsky.social are using new biotech to see things never seen before.

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).

I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing Michael Bruchas about an absolutely banger recent paper from his group that tracked down cells in the brainstem that subtlety and precisely control the output of the locus coeruleus. Check out my interview here. I hope you like it as much as I did!

Autonomic physiological coupling of the global fMRI signal Nature Neuroscience - The brain and body are necessarily connected. Here the authors show that brain blood flow and electrical activity are coupled with systemic physiological changes in the body.

First post on an exciting new manuscript online today @natneuro.nature.com - in collab with @lucinauddin.bsky.social and Catie Chang. We take a fresh look at the physiological dynamics associated with the global signal 🧠 ...

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

Read here:
rdcu.be/ek01F

Heterogeneous pericoerulear neurons tune arousal and exploratory behaviours - Nature A set of neurons in the peri-locus coeruleus region controls arousal and avoidance states, providing an understanding of the neurobiological basis of arousal and exploratory behaviours.

A wonderful day for science, to see the (peri) #LC in all its glory. A ginormous effort from all involved, and a fantastic resource for the field. Chapeau 🎩

🧠 🔵

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

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...

My lab is looking for a PhD candidate, in collaboration with ​Bernhard Englitz​'s lab.

www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Mice dynamically adapt to opponents in competitive multi-player games Competing for resources in dynamic social environments is fundamental for survival, and requires continuous monitoring of both 'self' and 'others' to guide effective choices. Yet our understanding of ...

First preprint from our lab! An @jerlich.bsky.social collaboration

We developed novel frameworks to study multi-agent decisions in mice.

Mice flexibly shift their decision preference under social competition, by integrating real-time self and opponent information!

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

I am so happy—this is the first 1st author paper I have written, since the cancer diagnosis of my late wife seven years ago.
📑 PAPER ALERT: "Beyond binding: from modular to natural vision" in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2025) sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The cingulate cortex facilitates auditory perception under challenging listening conditions | PNAS We often exert greater cognitive resources (i.e., listening effort) to understand speech under challenging acoustic conditions. This mechanism can ...

Excited to share my latest work just out in @pnas.org! This NIH MOSAIC K99-funded project identifies a top-down cortical circuit—from cingulate to auditory cortex—that supports auditory perceptual performance in challenging listening conditions: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A prospective code for value in the serotonin system - Nature Merging ideas from reinforcement learning theory with recent insights into the filtering properties of the dorsal raphe nucleus, a unifying perspective is found explaining why serotonin neurons are ac...

I'm excited to share that the last chapter of my PhD thesis is now published in Nature! 🍾

What drives serotonin neurons? We think it's the expectation of future reward and --- critically --- how fast this expectation is increasing. 📈

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

1/6

The title of the paper, "Beliefs about Perception Shape Perceptual Inference: An Ideal Observer Model of Detection", with the author names, and Fig. 1: a schematic of an inverse optics account of vision.

Our "I would have seen it if it were there" paper — a collaboration with @ranimo.bsky.social and @clarepress.bsky.social — is now out in Psych. Review.

There’s a lot in this paper, but here are what I see as the 3 main takeaways:

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

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!

Slow cortical dynamics generate context processing and novelty detection The brain efficiently processes sensory information by selecting novelty and discarding redundancies. In this work, Shymkiv et al. demonstrate that through a high-dimensional ensemble representation, ...

Neuron

Slow cortical dynamics generate context processing and novelty detection
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

My lab is looking for a computational neuroscience postdoctoral researcher:
www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
Come join us at the @dondersinst.bsky.social!

A Neuropixels Opto probe with 3 blue emitters and 3 red emitters lighting up in succession, with corresponding neural activity in different layers of the cortex.

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of

Neuropixels Opto

Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics

Today in bioRxiv

960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors

By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al

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

(1/2)

A detailed theory of thalamic and cortical microcircuits for predictive visual inference A generative vision model offers a detailed theory for cortical columns, thalamus, and computations in cortical circuits.

Happy to have this published …https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr6698