Raunak Basu

Orbitofrontal cortex computes gaze-dependent comparisons between attributes rather than integrated values When choosing between options with multiple attributes, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is thought to integrate across those attributes, aiding in value comparisons. This study shows in monkeys that OF...

Happy to have some good science news - our new study with @aqperkins.bsky.social is out in @plosbiology.org!

dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

New review on neural manifold and population activity in the brain-
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hippocampal representations drift in stable multisensory environments - Nature Tracking of individual place cells in mouse CA1 shows that representational drift is not influenced by changes in environment or behaviour, and is lower for more excitable place cells.

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab!

We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time.

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

#science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

Congrats Katja!! looks amazing

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com!

We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments

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

This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

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...

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

Hence, learning the currently active locations can't rely on any long-term plasticity (although I believe that such mechanisms would be required to learn the task rules). The activity dynamics observed in this task can provide some clues regarding how 'in-context' learning is implemented.

The orbitofrontal cortex maps future navigational goals - Nature Dedicated cells in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex map an animal s instantaneous position in space; by contrast, its future goal location is represented in the orbitofrontal cortex, a structure ...

Great question!! We introduced a task where the rats needed to alternate between specific locations at a given moment in time, but these locations kept changing very frequently (within minutes).
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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...

How do animals learn new rules? By systematically testing diff. behavioral strategies, guided by selective attn. to rule-relevant cues: rdcu.be/etlRV
Akin to in-context learning in AI, strategy selection depends on the animals' "training set" (prior experience), with similar repr. in rats & humans.

Event structure sculpts neural population dynamics in the lateral entorhinal cortex Our experience of the world is a continuous stream of events that must be segmented and organized at multiple timescales. The neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unknown. In this work, we...

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it.
In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2)

👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Fragmented replay of very large environments in the hippocampus of bats Hippocampal replays in bats flying in a 200-m tunnel depict short fragments of long flight trajectories, suggesting constraints on the mechanisms and functions of replay.

Amazing study: @tamir-eliav.bsky.social from the Ulanovsky lab describes replay events in a large scale environment (200 m tunnel). 🦇

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

A flexible hippocampal population code for experience relative to reward - Nature Neuroscience Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵

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

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature!

When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️

The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar

bit.ly/3HvWSum

We live in a dynamic world, but we often study navigation as if the world is static. So how do we flexibly adapt in the face of new, pivotal information? @stephmprince.bsky.social addresses just that question in her latest paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

A vector calculus for neural computation in the cerebellum Null space theory predicts that neurons generate spikes not only to produce behavior but also to prevent the undesirable effect of other neurons on behavior. In this work, we show that this competitiv...

Neuronal computation in the cerebellum via a vector calculus.

Work of Mohammad Amin Fakharian, Alden Shoup, Paul Hage, and Hisham Elseweifi

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

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...

Impressive study from Richard Morris's group:

Hippocampal reactivation of planned
trajectories is required for effective goal
choice in an allocentric memory task

#hippocampus #neuroskyence #navigation #memory #planning

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

Tiger turnaround as populations grow in India Nature - Tiger numbers in India are starting to rebound after decades of being perilously low. This recovery offers lessons for conserving other rare animals.

Tiger numbers in India are starting to rebound after decades of being perilously low.

This recovery offers lessons for conserving other rare animals

https://go.nature.com/3EpQfIA

Check out our latest paper today in Nature: “Goal specific hippocampal inhibition gates learning” www.nature.com/articles/s41...
By Nuri Jeong, Xiao Zheng, Abby Paulson, Steph Prince and colleagues.

Munich city skyline

📢 🚨 Postdoc Opportunity 📢 🚨
Join us at @lmumuenchen.bsky.social to study how neural circuits 🧠 drive adaptive behavior. The lab uses state-of-the-art neuroscience technologies and offers a supportive environment 🤗!
⏳ Deadline: 15. April 2025
Learn more and apply: www.fens.org/careers/job-...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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!

Striatal dopamine represents valence on dynamic regional scales Adaptive decision making relies on dynamic updating of learned associations where environmental cues come to predict valenced stimuli, such as food or threat. Cue-guided behavior depends on a network ...

Our latest! We measure dopamine signals as rats disambiguate cues that predict reward or threat. We find that dopamine flexibly tracks the changing salience and value of cues, but according to region-specific scales, rapid within-trial dopamine fluctuations prioritize different stimulus features.

Scientists crack the code for why locusts swarm – DW – 02/27/2025 Virtual reality platform uncovers the collective behavior of swarming locusts. Their research could help secure agricultural lands and food supply.

Coverage of our recent locust paper in @science.org by DW www.dw.com/en/scientist...

New from the lab!! 👉🏼 authors.elsevier.com/a/1kgT43BtfH... 📝 @cellpress.bsky.social We discovered that genetically-defined neuron types in the hippocampus form unique manifolds! Dual color imaging, chemogenetics and topological analysis all at once! With Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social

Picture of Nature article, published 19 Feburary 2025, titled "An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning", with authors Adam S. Lowet, Qiao Zheng, Melissa Meng, Sara Matias, Jan Drugowitsch & Naoshige Uchida.

Excited that Adam Lowet's PhD work has been just been published in @nature.com at doi.org/10.1038/s415.... He has already posted about it on Twitter/X (see twitter.com/Adam_Lowet/s...), but let me re-post his thread here. 1/9

A dual-pathway architecture for stress to disrupt agency and promote habit - Nature Adaptive decision-making often requires an understanding of our agency in a situation; however, chronic stress can disrupt agency and promote inflexible, habitual behaviour by turning off a brain path...

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper📃🚨

Out today, @jackiegio.bsky.social discovered brain pathways that support agency and habit and how chronic stress disrupts them to rob of us our agency and cause us to form rigid habits 🧵👇

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

Free full text: rdcu.be/eaxEv

Global modules robustly emerge from local interactions and smooth gradients - Nature The principle of peak selection is described, by which local interactions and smooth gradients drive self-organization of discrete global modules.

1/ Our paper appeared in @Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... w/ Fiete Lab and @khonamikail.bsky.social .
Explains emergence of multiple grid cell modules, w/ excellent match to data! Novel mechanism for applying across vast systems from development to ecosystems. 🧵👇