Zijing Wu

I am recruiting graduate students for the experimental side of my lab @mcgill.ca for admission in Fall 2026!
Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

Subsecond dopamine fluctuations do not specify the vigor of ongoing actions Nature Neuroscience - Liu and colleagues show that the vigor (that is, speed and amplitude) of dexterous movements is not controlled by ongoing fluctuations in extracellular dopamine within the...

Delighted to see this finally out: rdcu.be/eO9oW
We tested whether brief striatal dopamine release events influence the vigor of skilled movements. Despite popular belief, we did not find any evidence linking rapid dopamine dynamics to motor vigor on a moment-by-moment basis.

First paper from the lab!
We propose a model that separates estimation of odor concentration and presence and map it on olfactory bulb circuits
Led by @chenjiang01.bsky.social and @mattyizhenghe.bsky.social joint work with @jzv.bsky.social and with @neurovenki.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social

Excited to share that our work ‘Simultaneous detection and estimation in olfactory sensing’ with @mattyizhenghe.bsky.social, @neurovenki.bsky.social , @cpehlevan.bsky.social, @jzv.bsky.social and @paulmasset.bsky.social has been launched!

1/7

Congrats Hafez!

This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful.

When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨

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

How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning?

Read on to find out more! 🧵

Thanks for sharing this exciting work! It seems the author's link has expired, so maybe it's worth updating? (Was able to find the paper myself 🙂)

Yes, finally! The bookmarking button is here for caching of both existing and future posts.

My biggest skill/life gains come when I’m unconscious of the external metering. Heavy reliance on external reward signals, neglecting the intrinsic drives and non-reward returns hamper long-horizon success in complex real life setting - a lose hypothesis - and what in part motivates #scicomm :)

Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today?

Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online:
www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels
(guess who talked about which!)

It's a comprehensive examination across Marr's three levels - in conjunction with chapters on dopamine and psychiatric conditions - as Prof. @PeterDayan describes in the opening perspective, for 'the most important and most elusive molecule in the brain.'

What's even better than a great review is a volume of them! So excited to learn that The Handbook of Dopamine is out!

Synergistic Reinforcement Learning by Cooperation of the Cerebellum and Basal Ganglia The cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia are essential for flexible learning in mammals. Although traditionally thought to operate under different learning rules, recent evidence suggests th...

Another RL in rodents paper. This one shows synchronized responses in cerebellum and SNr during learning - definitely feels like the whole-brain aspect of RL needs more exploration like this!

www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

#neuroscience 🧪

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

Two papers out today on RL in the dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain of mice (one from McGill's new PI @paulmasset.bsky.social). Both papers demonstrate heterogeneity in discount factors!

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

🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

Honoured to have been selected as a #SloanFellow
Thankful for all the support from family, mentors, collaborators, colleagues and students along the way!
@sloanfoundation.bsky.social

What a great thread! Repost for bookmarking. A real bookmarking button is needed here as great content and convo are emerging at scale now.

I am recruiting graduate students for my lab @mcgillu.bsky.social for admission in Fall 2025! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.