Vinny Costa

Excellent point

Hot take…asking whether mechanisms relevant for flies remembering odors aligns with those underlying working memory in primates is silly.

Mushroom bodies and lateral prefrontal cortex aren’t even close to an example of convergent evolution.

bsky.app/profile/blue...

Neural coding of choice and outcome are modulated by uncertainty in orbitofrontal but not secondary motor cortex - Nature Communications Neural mechanisms underlying flexible learning and decision-making are not fully understood. Using single-cell calcium imaging, authors here found that neurons in orbitofrontal and secondary motor cortex exhibit complementary roles in reward learning, with neurons in the former exerting a sustained role in conditions of uncertainty.

🎇 Excited to finally share JL Romero Sosa’s publication! Results are from single-cell imaging in different subregions of rat frontal cortex during ✨de novo learning. Spoiler: everything is not everywhere all at once www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Risk reshapes amygdala representation of choice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.06.680813v1

Which ballon? Honestly I ate a bacon burrito with Christmas at 5:30AM and ping ponged all across the launch field for four hours. Didn’t realize there would be no mass ascension until they deflated Darth Vader.

It’s wild with 500+ balloons.

All faculty seminar visits should conclude with a balloon fiesta. Thanks for the invite @jeremyhogeveen.bsky.social!

Well deserved!

Excited to announce that I'll be moving to the Univ of California Irvine @ucirvine.bsky.social next Spring!🌴

Happily, this is not goodbye to Japan as I'll continue my lab @RIKEN_CBS for some time.

Help spread the word: the new UCI lab will be hiring, DM or email (johaono@gmail.com) if interested!

Jonathan is honestly one of the best most talented junior PIs out there and joining his lab is essentially future proofing your career

This is my urn. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My urn is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my urn is useless. Without my urn, I am useless. I must decide if my urn is red or green. I will ...

My department at Emory is a hiring a tenure-track neuroscientist!

Anyone who's talked to me in the last 4 years knows I cannot say enough good things about my dept and the neuroscience community here. My colleagues are so wonderfully supportive. Postdocs, please apply!

apply.interfolio.com/174371

Role of molecularly defined lateral septum cell types and circuits in social behaviors - Neuropsychopharmacology Neuropsychopharmacology - Role of molecularly defined lateral septum cell types and circuits in social behaviors

New Hot Topics piece from @rphillips3.bsky.social and Stephanie Page in @npp-journal.bsky.social describing emerging insights on roles of molecularly-defined cell types in the lateral septum, which serves as a hub for coordinating diverse social behaviors.

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

Rare hard money gig. Emory and ATL neuroscience community are excellent.

I’m hiring at all levels and accepting graduate students through Psychology and the Graduate Program in Neuroscience. Reach out if you’re interested in joining a collaborative, fun, creative, and supportive team in beautiful Vancouver! 🏔️ ⛷️ 🏖️ 🌆

Congrats Zach! 🎉 Our lab would not have gotten where it is without you.

If you're looking for a mentor who is supportive, innovative and deeply invested in helping trainees grow, consider joining his lab! 👇

Did you negotiate infinite sea plane commutes into your package. So jealous. Congratulations!

*There

The neurocomputational bases of explore-exploit decision-making How do humans and other animals make the decision to explore new options instead of exploiting familiar favorites? Hogeveen et al. find evidence for similar computations underlying explore-exploit dec...

Their is a foreshadowing of the relevant circuits in @jeremyhogeveen.bsky.social’s recent paper mapping where novelty-driven explorations bonuses are encoded in humans after showing cross-species correspondence of novelty seeking and behavioral modeling www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

We have evidence it’s at least partly mediated by amygdala-striatal circuitry and interactions with frontopolar cortex. We don’t have all the pieces of that puzzle in place yet, but hopefully soon.

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence

This is fantastic work.

Monkeys show the same pattern of “optimistic” exploration in multi-arm bandits www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Didn’t mean to make you lose sleep! Both are exciting contributions.

Look forward to that one!

Attractor dynamics reflect decision confidence in macaque prefrontal cortex - PubMed Decisions are made with different degrees of consistency, and this consistency can be linked to the confidence that the best choice has been made. Theoretical work suggests that attractor dynamics in ...

Great stuff. Your theory would fit with recent evidence that attractor basin depth in PFC should reflect decision confidence during value based choice, correct? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37798412/

a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real:

I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job!

I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math

and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

Human single-neuron activity is modulated by intracranial theta burst stimulation of the basolateral amygdala Firing rate analyses revealed neurons throughout the hippocampus, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex in humans that exhibited heterogeneous responses to intracranial theta b...

Excited to share our new eLife paper from our lab's first Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Justin Campbell! In this paper, Justin explored the effects of direct electrical stimulation to the human amygdala on single-unit activity throughout the brain. We'd love to hear your thoughts!

A VWR Milkshake Stand might actually be the key to boosting attendance at SfN

Sam if the theories are so good, how come you and the other theorists are at a Gas N’ Sip on a Saturday night at some ski resort, all the experimental data in the world ever increasingly at your fingertips, completely alone, drinking beers with no solutions to the brain, anywhere?

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!"