Adithya Rajagopalan

Come be our colleague! The Center for Neural Science at NYU is accepting applications at the Assistant Professor level in computational neuroscience and/or neural engineering apply.interfolio.com/182074

Thank you for the great summary, @thetransmitter.bsky.social, and the shout-outs from scientists we admire. There is so much we don’t know about how sex hormones modulate behavior and we’ll keep exploring!

Sex hormone boosts female rats’ sensitivity to unexpected rewards During the high-estradiol stages of their estrus cycle, female rats learn faster than they do during other stages—and than male rats overall—thanks to a boost in their dopaminergic response to reward…

“It’s giving mechanistic insight into how estrogen modulates reinforcement learning—all the way down to the molecular mechanism,” says Ilana Witten.

By @avaskham.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/sex-hormones...

Who wore it better? Our new paper shows that rat OFC supports Bayesian inference of hidden states! With neural correlates of inferred state transitions at the level of single neurons and population-level latent factors. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

To study how animals understand the physical world (and the rules that govern its dynamics), @jinyao-y.bsky.social trains rats to play fetch with robots 🐀🤖🎾

To learn more, come to our poster Tuesday morning!
[Board W11] Rats learn and use intuitive physics knowledge to solve fetch tasks.
#SfN2025

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience The study of foraging is central to a renewed interest in naturalistic behavior in neuroscience. Applying a foraging framework grounded in behavioral …

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience

From the amazing @lauragrima.bsky.social and colleagues - definitely looking forward to reading this!

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition

Come say hello and check out some cool science from folks in the lab!

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7

Ecstatic to announce our exciting new paper! Rat-mon y Cajal found a new friend to help him learn. Introducing, Dr. Tutor-us!

1/ Hello Drosophila-philists and braino-maniacs! 👋🪰🧠🧪

The Caron lab has a new preprint, and it is about 🥁🥁🥁 democracy!

Neuro-democracy, to be precise. So: drop EVERYTHING and listen up — a 🧶!

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

Competitive integration of time and reward explains value-sensitive foraging decisions and frontal cortex ramping dynamics Bukwich and Campbell et al. show that mice integrate elapsed time and reward intake, scaled by a latent patience variable, to decide when to leave virtual “patches.” Frontal cortex ramping activity ma...

Our paper on foraging is now published in Neuron! Read it here:

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

This project was co-led by Michael Bukwich (not on Bluesky) and me, with major contributions from all co-authors. Huge thanks to the whole team!

🚨Registration for Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025 closes October 20th 🚨

Speakers
@mkflugge.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @benhayden.bsky.social @ellileadbeater.bsky.social
@davidrobbe.bsky.social @dlbarack.bsky.social @becketebs.bsky.social

uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

'Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience'

by @LauraGrima.bsky.social, @Hannah-Haberkern.bsky.social, Rishika Mohanta, @MaimMorimoto.bsky.social @adiraj95.bsky.social @EmmavScholey.bsky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Had a lot of fun co-writing to this review! Discussing #foraging through the lens of neuroscience.

Really excited to share a review I contributed to, out now in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social. We explore how foraging can offer a framework for studying brain and behaviour in natural contexts. It’s been a pleasure working with colleagues across species and disciplines on this. Check it out! 👇

Plus, there's now a related conference organized by some wonderful people @unibirmingham.bsky.social in the UK, including @brainapps.bsky.social, @markdhumphries.bsky.social, and others. (Registration for this conference is still open until the 20th October!) uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

A little backstory on this one: sometime during the pandemic @hannah-haberkern.bsky.social and I were chatting in the servery at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social about how to encourage interactions between people working on foraging (+ neuroscience) across different species and perspectives... 1/n

Years ago @lauragrima.bsky.social talked about what a pity it is when scientists who work on #foraging miss out on fruitful interactions because they work with different animals. Together with collegues we started a virtual seminar series, which grew into a conference and now a review!

Also want to thank the many people (Janelia foraging conference attendees, future of foraging seminar organizers, and other colleagues) who gave us some great feedback along the way!

Inspired by discussions at several recent foraging-related seminar series and conferences, our review in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social explores an expanded role for foraging as a framework in neuroscience and discusses future directions for the field. Do check it out.

doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

I do however agree with the general themes the author is pointing to regarding the differences between American and British TV.

Sure, We Gained Our Independence, But We Lost The Ability To Make Anything As Good As ‘Taskmaster’ | Defector The Fourth of July is always there to remind us that we aren’t the country we fancy ourselves being, but this year’s national try-not-to-blow-your-hand-off munitions festival was even grimmer given th...

defector.com/sure-we-gain...

While I agree that @taskmaster.tv is indeed close to "the absolute zenith of humanity's artistic development". I would like to refer the author and anyone who follows my bluesky to @dropout.tv's incredible @gamechangershow.bsky.social.

I am delighted to announce registration and abstract submission is open for "The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025" to be held at the Edgbaston Park Hotel, University of Birmingham, UK on 3-5th November 2025. uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

Do register for what is going to be a very exciting conference!

uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

Zoning out could be beneficial—and may actually help us learn faster Actions that may seem unproductive – like aimlessly wandering around a city or exploring a new mall – could play an important role in how our brains learn, according research from HHMI’s Janelia...

🧠Zoning out could be beneficial—and may actually help us learn faster.

🥼New research led by @zhong-lin.bsky.social @marius10p.bsky.social @computingnature.bsky.social

🔗 www.janelia.org/news/zoning-...

Rat-mon y Cajal, our lab mascot, is a pro at our task because he went to kindergarten first. His nemesis, Le Chat GPT, just copied off everyone else’s homework.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Compositional pretraining improves computational efficiency and matches animal behaviour on complex tasks - Nature Machine Intelligence Hocker et al. demonstrate a method for training recurrent neural networks, which they call ‘kindergarten curriculum learning’, involving pretraining on simple cognitive tasks to improve learning effic...

David Hocker’s paper about compositional pretraining for RNNs that efficiently produces animal-like behaviors! Modeling cognitive tasks in RNNs requires thinking about latent abilities that animals bring to an experiment. Funded by NIH/CRCNS. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

During Q&A, whenever someone asks a question about our "mice."

Started off this morning emailing my Senators and Congressman about the NIH and the potential damage being done by unnecessary disruptions.

They need to hear from us loud and clear. Constituents matter to them as one of the primary purposes of a politician is to get re-elected (and its their job).

Looking forward to this!