Shih-Chieh Lin

Huge thanks to lead author Sz-Wen Liu (@szwenliu.bsky.social)—freshly minted PhD 🎓—for leading this project from start to finish. Also grateful to our colleagues at NYCU, lab members, and reviewers who helped sharpen this study. 10/end

We also see a negative correlation between stimulus-locked bursts and outcome responses—an RPE-like signature consistent with prior reports—suggesting BF bursts may transform stimulus-onset RPE into an attention-for-performance amplification signal. 9/n

Bimodal and unimodal trials show similar behavior and BF patterns, consistent with prior BF work: bigger bursts → faster reward seeking; suppression → nogo/rapid stopping. Extends a bidirectional gain-control view to selective attention. 8/n

BF population activity mirrors behavior trial by trial, tracking attention switches during block transitions as well as spontaneous A↔V shifts, and aligning neural dynamics with the animal’s current attentional set. 7/n

Interpretation: selection of the attended modality occurs upstream of BF; BF then provides a modality-common, post-selection/target-detection signal—an amplification that links attended targets to reward-seeking actions. 6/n

When A and V oddballs co-occur but only one is attended, BF shows neither divisive normalization nor multisensory synergy. Instead, attended and ignored streams are processed in parallel and summed (near) linearly. 5/n

Converge, not diverge: the same BF neurons carry attended A and attended V signals. Across units, amplitudes are tightly correlated (r≈0.8); variability is essentially a single scalar (amplitude), not modality tuning—unlike modality-specific attention signals in corticothalamic circuits. 4/n

Single noncholinergic BF "bursting" neurons show strong, short-latency bursts to attended targets and minimal responses to identical stimuli when ignored. BF activity tracks behavior in real time, even during spontaneous shifts of attention. 3/n

We built a new cross-modal oddball task in rats that pits auditory (A) vs. visual (V) stimuli simultaneously and allows both instructed and spontaneous attention shifts. Choices are unaffected by the unattended stream—clean behavioral evidence for cross-modal selective attention. 2/n

New lab paper in #ScienceAdvances: we identify a modality-common selective-attention signal in noncholinergic #BasalForebrain (BF) “bursting” neurons, distinct from the modality-specific attention signals typically described in corticothalamic circuits. 1/n
www.science.org/doi/full/10....

🚨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! 🧵

Congratulations! Really beautiful work!

Inferring internal states across mice and monkeys using facial features - Nature Communications Here, the authors created a virtual reality task for monkeys and mice to explore if internal states like attention are similar across species. Their facial expressions during the task were similar, su...

Now out in @natcomms.nature.com‬: Mice and monkeys spontaneously shift through comparable cognitive states - and it's written all over their faces! (1/7)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A multidimensional distributional map of future reward in dopamine neurons - Nature An algorithm called time–magnitude reinforcement learning (TMRL) extends distributional reinforcement learning to take account of reward time and magnitude, and behavioural and neurophysiological...

Together with this paper by the group of Joe Paton www.nature.com/articles/s41... our results across the two papers complement each other providing strong evidence that distinct dopamine neurons discount future rewards at different rates providing a substrate for multi-timescale RL in the brain

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...

Great work from my next door neighbor!

Imaging neuronal voltage beyond the scattering limit - Nature Methods ALI is an approach for analyzing voltage imaging data that is inspired by algorithms used in super-resolution microscopy. It allows resolving the activity of single neurons in densely labeled populati...

Big Congratulations Tsai-Wen!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Not sure about the question. Doesn’t hallucination, by definition, mean that the subject is unaware?
I am sure @kepecslab.bsky.social would have a better answer.

Striatal dopamine mediates hallucination-like perception in mice A mouse behavioral model of hallucinations yields circuit-level insights into the dopamine hypothesis of psychosis.

Something like this?

www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

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.

Impressive study in @nature from my colleague Marcus Stephenson-Jones at UCL in the @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social

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

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!

This looks awesome and very valuable for the study of basal forebrain. Anything in particular you are looking to characterize? We are very interested in GABAergic basal forebrain neurons and would love to know how rodent and human BF are conserved or differ.

Congrats to @kepecslab.bsky.social !

Beautiful work. Congratulations!

a picture of a pikachu with the words " i still have hope " written below it ALT: a picture of a pikachu with the words " i still have hope " written below it

Some glimmers of hope (but mostly confusion) this morning.

I have heard that no intramural tenure track investigators were supposed to be on the termination list although some folks clearly got termination notices.

I am actively checking into this every way I can.

1/2

This is atrocious!

A role for proprioceptors in sngception Proprioceptors mediate acidosis sensation that contributes to acid-induced pain chronicity.

Very interesting paper on a potential role for proprioceptors in sensing muscle acidosis and driving the perception of soreness.

"Sng" is a Taiwanese word for both sour taste and muscle soreness. It also imitates the natural vocalization of humans feeling sore.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Symmetries and Continuous Attractors in Disordered Neural Circuits A major challenge in neuroscience is reconciling idealized theoretical models with complex, heterogeneous experimental data. We address this challenge through the lens of continuous-attractor networks...

(1/30) New preprint! "Symmetries and continuous attractors in disordered neural circuits" with Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky
bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations Dayu!

Prefrontal transthalamic uncertainty processing drives flexible switching - Nature By examining neural responses from tree shrews performing hierarchical decision tasks with rule reversals, the authors identify a thalamocortical mechanism for regulating cognitive flexibility.

Two papers out showing that thalamic inputs determine how cortex responds to a hierarchical task with rule switching:

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

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

🧠📈 🧪