Ralph Emilio Peterson

Less than a week left to apply!

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity!

We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have:
(1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs)
(2) better hand dexterity
(3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Analysis of communication and collective behavior in animal groups

⭐PhD position available!⭐
Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets
imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

New York City’s Rats Have a Secret Nightlife—And a Language Humans Can’t Hear A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offe...

A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offer insights to transform urban planning and pest control

New York City’s Rats Have a Secret Nightlife—And a Language Humans Can’t Hear A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offe...

🌆🐀Scientific American article about the project we're starting on NYC rats!! scientificamerican.com/article/scie...

w/ Emily Mackevicius, Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, @basisresearch.bsky.social

Seeking collaborators and funders 🐀🌆

New paper on precise tool use learning in carrion crows @currentbiology.bsky.social. We show that—like New Caledonian crows—expert carrion crows pay close attention to the working end of their tool, suggesting tool integration into their peripersonal space. 🧵 & vids! 👇

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Can't wait to read this preprint from Misha Ahrens and team. Calcium imaging in larval zebrafish, in every cell in the body! Amazing.

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

What do neuroscience labs and the streets of New York City have in common? They are both commonly home to rats, a feature this research team is leveraging to study rat social cognition in the wild.

By @martajhill.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/social-cogni...

Postdoctoral Neuroscience Researcher - Storrs Mansfield, Connecticut job with Audette Lab, University of Connecticut | 38911 Fully funded postdoctoral research position studying context-dependent sensory processing in the mouse motor and auditory thalamus and cortex.

The lab is growing! Our team is seeking talented scientists to study flexible sensory processing. We design freely-moving and head-fixed acoustic behaviors alongside acute and wireless neural recordings. PD and grad roles available

Please help spread the word 🙏🧠🎵🐭

neurojobs.sfn.org/job/38911/po...

Thank you Jonny! Nice to see you back on here, I hope all is well.

Thanks! We use an AudioMoth and have really liked the quality/ease of use.

lol…loved the big rat appearance, very topical

Thank you! Some interesting vocalization observations…

bsky.app/profile/ralp...

Thank you!

Thank you! We are hosting someone on sabbatical now, so yes!

Thank you John!

Exactly.

We are piloting V2 of this work and would be excited to brainstorm next directions. Please be in touch if you have comments, questions, or would like to collaborate!

This is probably also a good time to announce that I have parlayed this literal PhD moonlight project into a postdoc at @basisresearch.bsky.social, where I am working on Collaborative Intelligent Systems (biological and artificial) with Emily Mackevicius.

Together, we show that it's possible to make high-resolution behavioral measurements of rats in their natural urban envt and apply modern ML tools for behavior + envt quant. We are working on more methods to map the sensory world and frameworks for inferring cognitive strategies within these worlds.

Finally, we used a wireless ultrasonic mic to record vocalizations. We observed an amazing diversity of calls which have acoustic features that lay outside of the standard distribution reported in the lab. Also, we see interesting usage of the classically negative affect 22 kHz call during foraging.

It's hard to interpret observations like this because in the field we cannot control environmental factors that might be causing movement. Instead, we built 3D reconstructions of the environment using gaussian splatting with the goal of building causal models that can link environment + behavior.

We noticed periods of coordinated collective movement where some, but not all, animals appeared to participate. We implemented multi-animal tracking and a size-estimation model to show that larger rats move faster and are more likely to participate in collective bursts than smaller animals.

Thermal imaging worked great at our sites. High SNR and able to see through vegetation in parks.

We mined NYC311 reports of rat sightings to pick a time and place to perform the field studies. We settled on 3 recording locations in distinct environments (subway, park, sidewalk): Union Square Station, Central Park (Ramble), and W 125th St.

Computational Urban Ecology of New York City Rats Urban rats are highly adaptable, thriving in the dynamic and often inhospitable conditions of modern cities. Despite substantial mitigation efforts, they remain an enduring presence in urban environme...

New preprint!



tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵

w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius

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

Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro

🚨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! 🧵⬇️

No thank YOU for making VocalPy! I’ve liked it so much that I used it in a ~main~ figure in my next paper

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...