Ismael T. Freire

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

This is intetresting, paper argues that dopamine also encodes "action prediction errors", i.e. differences between actions you predict you will make and actions you do, regardless of reward. Could be used to reinforce habits for repetitive voluntary behaviours:

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

🧠📈 🧪

A few years ago, with @tyrellturing.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social and others, we showed one single objective (prediction) was sufficient for explaining specialized pathways of mouse visual cortex: tinyurl.com/2vsjbve7

Super cool to see the same observation now for human visual cortex.

Many-Two-One: Diverse Representations Across Visual Pathways Emerge from A Single Objective How the human brain supports diverse behaviours has been debated for decades. The canonical view divides visual processing into distinct "what" and "where/how" streams – however, their origin and inde...

🧠 NEW PREPRINT
Many-Two-One: Diverse Representations Across Visual Pathways Emerge from A Single Objective
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(PDF) The Problem of Organization in Biology and Its Reception in Mainstream Philosophy of Science in the Mid-20th Century PDF | In the early to mid-20th century, English-speaking organicist biologists strongly advocated the idea of organization in biological phenomena as a... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

My paper on the history of biological organization was accepted at HOPOS! The paper looks at organicist efforts in the first half of the 20th century to elevate organization in biology as a central practical and theoretical notion. #hpbio #philbio #histbio www.researchgate.net/publication/...

It's just a “swarm of fish" following a duck.

title and abstract from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

table 1 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n

This is very impressive work, but I find it weird that there's no mention of the ecology of these primates in your paper. My gut prediction from your premise aligns with your findings, but I suspect that ecological niche would be an even stronger predictor than either phylogeny or brain morphology.

Very excited to share this new preprint, with Henry Potter:
"Chance, Choice, and Control: Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe" philarchive.org/rec/POTCCA-6 😊

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

1
To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

One like, one opinion about how to solve climate change.

Predictable. The text corpora that these LLMs are trained on contain the most prevalent biases of our society, and so naturally the LLM will reproduce them because that's what they're made to do. #llmsareapoxonhumanity
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"!

Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵

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

Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures - Nature Reviews Neuroscience As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research app...

Finally published:
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations

“Instead of panicking, or accepting corporate AI as inevitable in higher education, we need to build solidaristic strategies across education and other sectors, as well as across civil society and grassroots organizations fighting on many fronts, to establish bottom-up power over technology.”

🚨🚨 New paper alert: Culture vs. Institutions

@ainagallego.bsky.social‬, Ana Tur-Prats and I have a new paper out in the JOP that examines the impact of historical family types on modern-day female political representation.

Postdoctoral Researcher in psychology/cognitive science with focus on social learning and cultural evolution Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research? The Mechanisms of Social Behavior lab at the Karolinska Institutet (PI: Björn Lindström) in Stockholm, Sweden is seeking a highly qualified

💥New postdoc position! 💥

Join us to explore how people learn from each other—and how that drives cultural evolution.

Run experiments, build computational models & collaborate across Europe w. @lucasmolleman.bsky.social
📍 Stockholm
More info: shorturl.at/CY4wk

Resilient cortical maps - Nature Neuroscience Despite the loss of neurons during aging and the early stages of neurodegenerative disease, many cortical brain functions remain remarkably intact. Although this resilience is traditionally attributed...

Homeostasis can keep population-level responses stable in the face of neural drift and "vanishing neurons"

Nice write up of a paper I'm looking forward to reading but that seems to add more wood to the "populations are more than the sum of their neurons" fire

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

New preprint commentary from me, @malte.the100.ci, and @ianhussey.mmmdata.io.

Cognitive dissonance in large language models is neither cognitive nor dissonant.

THREAD BELOW 🧵

osf.io/preprints/ps...

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

'The myth of meritocracy in science collapses under the financial sacrifices expected at every career stage. From unpaid internships and self-funded conferences to underpaid graduate and postdoctoral positions, the hidden costs of ‘doing science’ are profound.'
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Universal dimensions of visual representation Probing neural representations reveals universal aspects of vision in artificial and biological networks.

The most brain-like representations of visual neural networks are also the most universal ones, i.e., they are largely independent of a network’s architecture or training. Cool new work by Chen & Bonner in #ScienceAdvances! #neuroAI
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here’s a Tip to Companies: Beware of Promoting AI in Products Consumers have less trust in offerings labeled as being powered by artificial intelligence, which reduces their interest in buying them, researchers say.

the tides are turning

"Consumers have less trust in offerings labeled as being powered by artificial intelligence, which can reduce their interest in buying them"

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-a...

Karl Lashley, writing in 1930, on the Basic Neural Mechanisms of Behaviour: wexler.free.fr/library/file...

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia

Our demands, see link

Hello & HAPPY FRIDAY, as promised an open letter by my lovely colleagues and myself. Everybody, feel free to sign this even if you are not NL-based and ‼️ share ‼️ (anonymous signature is poss):

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

I just found this yesterday. This is amazing Olivia, thank you! You can count me in!!

“Even the term 'Artificial Intelligence' … is widely misused, with conceptual unclarity coopted to advance industry agendas and undermine scholarly discussions. It is our task to demystify and to challenge 'AI' in our teaching, research & engagement with society.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Here's a bit of spice. Brain research clearly needs to tackle more complexity (than, say, Step 1: simple linear causal chains). But that leaves an ~infinite set of alternatives. Here, @pessoabrain.bsky.social advocates not for just a step 2, but a 3. /1

arxiv.org/abs/2411.03621

Emergent functional dynamics of link-bots Link-bots, single-stranded chains of active bots, exhibit emergent dynamic behaviors driven by geometric constraints.

No batteries, no computer, 'link-bots' are simple chains of V-shaped particles that, when vibrated, exhibit incredible collective behavior—moving, exploring, and even carrying objects together. youtu.be/Xki6XiA-lAI
#robotics #swarmintelligence #emergentbehavior www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling Respiration dynamically modulates sensory perception by orchestrating transient states of the brain and the body. Using simultaneous recordings of high-density magneto-encephalography (MEG), respirati...

New preprint with amazing work from @nchalas.bsky.social:

How does respiration influence (un-)predictable near-threshold perception? MEG, arousal modulation, excitability states, respiration phase-resolved connectivity changes - it's all there :)

#neuroskyence

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

Our preprint “How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy” is now online.

We show how coordinated multi-agent LLM swarms can infiltrate communities, craft synthetic grassroots “consensus,” and erode institutional trust—and what we can do now to stop it.

osf.io/preprints/os...