Where you look next isn’t arbitrary.
In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵

Neuronal spiking in the mammalian forebrain is dominated by a heterogeneous ground state Neuronal firing patterns have significant spatiotemporal variability with no agreed-upon theoretical framework. Using a combined experimental and mode…

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅
Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's always exciting when something ~straightforward (like a model of deciding bar orientation) is extended to account for something more mysterious (like a model of deciding whether to do something risky -> important for psychopathology). That's what @silvialogu.bsky.social & team do here.

How does our brain excel at complex object recognition, yet get fooled by simple illusory contours? What unifying principle governs all Gestalt laws of perceptual organization?

We may have an answer: integration of learned priors through feedback. New paper with @kenmiller.bsky.social! 🧵

Neuronal Activity in Orbitofrontal Cortex during Trinary Choices under Risk Economic choice entails computing and comparing the subjective values of different goods. Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is thought to contribute to both operations. However, previous work focused almost ...

New ms on trinary choices! Somewhat surprisingly, our monkeys’ choices satisfied IIA (independence of irrelevant alternatives). In OFC, decision variables were represented in the same way under trinary and under binary choices. This property implies IIA.

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

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

Variations in neuronal selectivity create efficient representational geometries for perception Our visual capabilities depend on neural response properties in visual areas of our brains. Neurons exhibit a wide variety of selective response properties, but the reasons for this diversity are unkn...

In many brain areas, neuronal tuning is heterogeneous. But how does this diversity help behavior? We show how tuning diversity shapes representational geometry and boosts coding efficiency for perception in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(w/ @sueyeonchung.bsky.social&Tony Movshon)

Confirmation bias through selective readout of information encoded in human parietal cortex Nature Communications - People often discard incoming information when it contradicts their pre-existing beliefs about the world. Here, the authors show that this discarded information is precisely...

1/ New paper by Hame Park, (@AraziAyelet), Bharath Talluri, Marco Celotto, Stefano Panzeri, Alan Stocker & Tobias Donner published in Nature Communications – “Confirmation Bias through Selective Readout of Information Encoded in Human Parietal Cortex”: rdcu.be/etlR7. Here is a summary:

This project began after my move to NIH and has been an eye-opening synthesis of my and Silvia's previous work. Couldn't be prouder of the incredible work of my first trainee and first author Corey Plate, who has just left NIH to begin his MD/PhD!

A population representation of the confidence in a decision in the parietal cortex At the end of a decision based on evidence accumulation, the neural representation of the accumulation is invariant across decisions. Zylberberg and Shadlen show, nonetheless, that accuracy can be dec...

Happy to share our new paper exploring how the brain might represent decision confidence.

A population representation of the confidence in a decision in the parietal cortex: Cell Reports www.cell.com/cell-reports...

At #cosyne2025? Come to my poster tonight!

A bit delayed, but I'm happy to announce my first paper as a postdoc in the Jazayeri lab! We discuss recent insights into the neurobiology of timing and why timing is a useful platform to understand flexible control of behavior more generally. We hope the review is useful!

tinyurl.com/5n8yhxet

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!

People talk a lot about objects, but what about the softness of a cushion, the greenness of an emerald, or the viscosity of oil? In our work just published @pnas.org, we shed light on how we make sense of the hundreds of materials around us.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I just wrote a book about how the type of work @markhisted.org is doing is key to breaking through the bottlenecks holding back new treatments for brain and mental disorders (from Alzheimers to depression). Seeing his work in danger makes me ill, and angry.

We must @standupforscience.bsky.social.

One of the NIMH PIs whose name is the termination list: Sooyhun Lee, whose lab just published this beautiful @nature.com paper (that has received too little press because comms at NIH are down). Read! Cite!

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

Brain-wide presynaptic networks of functionally distinct cortical neurons - Nature Behavioural-state-dependent pyramidal neurons have a distinct pattern of long-range glutamatergic inputs, with a larger proportion of thalamic versus motor cortex inputs compared with non-behavio...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... awesome new work out today! From the Lee lab in the intramural research program at NIMH!

Context-dependent decision-making in the primate hippocampal–prefrontal circuit - Nature Neuroscience The brain uses different valuation schemes across contexts. Elston and Wallis show this is supported by hippocampal encoding of context that is broadcast to prefrontal value subcircuits via theta sync...

Pleased to share the final version (out in @natureneuro.bsky.social ) of my recent project showing how the primate HPC and OFC interact during contextual reasoning!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A big thanks to the reviewers who made the paper better!

It's finally out!

Visual experience orthogonalizes visual cortical responses

Training in a visual task changes V1 tuning curves in odd ways. This effect is explained by a simple convex transformation. It orthogonalizes the population, making it easier to decode.

10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115235

Picture of neural manifolds for the two choices in a decision-making task, depicted in 3D and in 2D

New preprint: "The geometry of the neural state space of decisions", work by Mauro Monsalve-Mercado, buff.ly/42wVHD5. Surprising results & predictions! (Thread) We analyze neuropixel population recordings in macaque area LIP during a reaction time, random-dot motion 1/

🔵 NEW PAPER 🔵

Spatiotemporal Style Transfer #STST is out on #NatureComputationalScience!

STST as a framework for dynamic visual stimulus generation to study brain and machine vision

feat. @siegellab.bsky.social
paper: www.nature.com/articles/s43...
code: github.com/antoninogrec...

🧵👇

A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition - Nature Communications Measuring metacognitive ability is one of the enduring challenges in cognitive science. The current paper develops formal tests of the quality of different measures and assesses how current metrics pe...

My article "A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition" is finally out in Nature Communications 🎉 If you work on metacognition and think you know the psychometric properties of your favorite measure, you may be surprised.

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

The origin of color categories | PNAS To what extent does concept formation require language? Here, we exploit color to address this question and ask whether macaque monkeys have color ...

Great to start by sharing an exceptionally interesting paper on the origin of colour categories
Doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2400273121

Spiking activity in the monkey ventral stream in response to thousands of images.

An extensive dataset of spiking activity to reveal the syntax of the ventral stream - V1, V4, and IT neurons in monkeys viewing >25,000 natural images www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... by @paolopapale.bsky.social et al.; #BCI #NeuroTech #neuroscience

Linking neural population formatting to function Animals capable of complex behaviors tend to have more distinct brain areas than simpler organisms, and artificial networks that perform many tasks tend to self-organize into modules (1-3). This sugge...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵
#neuroskyence
1/

12 years in the making! I remember having long chats with Michael Oliver about this paper in 2012. Those are still some of the most comprehensive V4 recordings out there. So happy this is finally out.

How the human brain thinks about itself | Royal Society Royal Society Francis Crick Prize Lecture by Professor Stephen Fleming.

I'll be talking about all things metacognitive on 23rd Jan in a public lecture at the @royalsociety.org

It's free to attend and will also be broadcast live on the RS YouTube channel (no pressure then 😅)

royalsociety.org/science-even...

Leslie Ungerleider (1946 - 2020) was an extraordinary, pioneering neuroscientist. The latest issue of @jocn.bsky.social honors her legacy with articles authored by former colleagues & trainees that highlight critical aspects of her work and its influence https://buff.ly/4156UKw #cogsci #neuroscience

Big welcome to another neurosci. luminary, @eerosim.bsky.social.

Director of Computational Neuroscience at @simonsfoundation.org Flatiron Institute, NYU Professor, winner of many accolades, and overall great human who knows stuff and makes things happen.

Clear follow and starter pack addition!

🚨 PhD opportunity alert! 🚨

Join our lab @sidb-edinburgh.bsky.social in beautiful Edinburgh! We study the neural mechanisms underlying flexible decision-making using cutting-edge experimental and computational approaches.

We’re recruiting for two fully funded PhD positions. Details below 👇