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Posts by Benjamin Cowley

A pair of flies smashing their heads together with front legs clasped. The have black on the abdomen, brown on the thorax, and bright red eyes, They are fighting on the top of a mushroom.

A pair of flies smashing their heads together with front legs clasped. The have black on the abdomen, brown on the thorax, and bright red eyes, They are fighting on the top of a mushroom.

The fight continues with the challengers evenly balanced. 

A pair of flies smashing their heads together with front legs clasped. The have black on the abdomen, brown on the thorax, and bright red eyes, They are fighting on the top of a mushroom.

The fight continues with the challengers evenly balanced. A pair of flies smashing their heads together with front legs clasped. The have black on the abdomen, brown on the thorax, and bright red eyes, They are fighting on the top of a mushroom.

The fight continues with the fly on the right seeming to gain an upper hand and pushing the fly on the left backwards. The fly on the right is putting all his might into the battle, back legs in the air. 

A pair of flies smashing their heads together with front legs clasped. The have black on the abdomen, brown on the thorax, and bright red eyes, They are fighting on the top of a mushroom.

The fight continues with the fly on the right seeming to gain an upper hand and pushing the fly on the left backwards. The fly on the right is putting all his might into the battle, back legs in the air. A pair of flies smashing their heads together with front legs clasped. The have black on the abdomen, brown on the thorax, and bright red eyes, They are fighting on the top of a mushroom.

The fly on the right emerges victorious with the fly on the left exiting toward the back of the scene. 

A pair of flies smashing their heads together with front legs clasped. The have black on the abdomen, brown on the thorax, and bright red eyes, They are fighting on the top of a mushroom.

The fly on the right emerges victorious with the fly on the left exiting toward the back of the scene. A pair of flies smashing their heads together with front legs clasped. The have black on the abdomen, brown on the thorax, and bright red eyes, They are fighting on the top of a mushroom.

We noticed these fruit flies are behaving like tiny big horn sheep of fly world so we went back today to see if I could get some photos of the action. Here you have it, a play in 4 acts! Make me wonder if they evolved the elongated eyes for this purpose.
Zygothrica sp.
Intag Refugio, Ecuador

6 days ago 346 73 9 9
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Applications are open for the Junior Theoretical Neuroscientists Workshop which will take place July 21-24, 2026 at the Center for Computational Neuroscience, @flatironinstitute.org

Travel, lodging, and meals will be covered for accepted participants.
Application deadline: April 15, 2026

3 weeks ago 26 18 1 3
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Drosophila Neurobiology: Genes, Circuits & Behavior Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses -- a private, non-profit institution with research programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, bioinformatics.

Can't wait to serve again as co-director of the CSHL Drosophila Neurobiology course this year! 🧪🪰👀
Application Deadline: March 27
meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...
@cshlnews.bsky.social
@cshlcourses.bsky.social

3 months ago 25 14 1 1
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New paper out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social 🎉

What determines contextual modulation in V1? Why does the visual surround sometimes facilitate and sometimes suppress a neuron's response to its preferred stimulus?

3 weeks ago 67 31 2 0
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Along with @katrinvogt.bsky.social , @akhila1498.bsky.social and Klára Tučková we combine long timescale (3 hr) behavioral tracking of Drosophila larvae in patchy environments with varying statistics, along with quantitative analysis and computational modeling, to dissect foraging strategies. 1/n

3 weeks ago 25 4 1 2
Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) Information Session (2026)
Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) Information Session (2026) The Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) aims to spark and sustain interest in neuroscience among undergraduate students who have not had access to research opportunities. SURFiN provides funds for paid research assistantshi...

Curious about our Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) program? Watch our webinar recording and apply by April 21: www.youtube.com/watch #science #neuroscience

3 weeks ago 12 7 1 0

@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal!

A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

3 weeks ago 67 23 0 0
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Junior Theoretical Neuroscientists Workshop Junior Theoretical Neuroscientists Workshop on Simons Foundation

Applications are now open for our Junior Theoretical Neuroscientists Workshop which will take place July 21 - 24, 2026 at the Center for Computational Neuroscience @flatironinstitute.org

Learn more and apply by April 15 at www.simonsfoundation.org/event/jrwork...

3 weeks ago 13 8 1 0
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Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

4 weeks ago 155 68 2 3
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90th Symposium: AI in Biology Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses -- a private, non-profit institution with research programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, bioinformatics.

AI in Biology
90th Symposium in Quantitative Biology
May 26 - 31, 2026 at CSHL

Amazing line-up of speakers!

Abstracts due March 26.

meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

#cshlsymp26

4 weeks ago 0 1 0 0

My lab at U Göttingen is looking for a PostDoc or PhD student to work on an ERC-funded project at the intersection of computer vision, graphics & neuroscience.

4 weeks ago 9 7 1 0
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New preprint: our lab’s first Alzheimer’s paper! “Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵1/

1 month ago 100 28 5 4
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Applications Open for 2026–2027 Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Neuroscience Applications Open for 2026–2027 Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Neuroscience on Simons Foundation

Are you an undergrad looking to do hands-on #neuroscience research? Apply for our SURFiN fellowship! We're hosting an information webinar on March 25 + apps due April 21. Learn more: www.simonsfoundation.org/applications-open-for-20...

1 month ago 4 6 0 1
Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes
Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes YouTube video by Cosyne Talks

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc.

The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

1 month ago 160 56 3 1

Please circulate widely!

Open positions at the Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
sites.google.com/site/visionl...

How to Apply:
forms.gle/vWa1PwUrcpWf...
Deadline : March 31 2026

1 month ago 8 17 1 1
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A remarkable journey of resilience and transformation, from the chaotic corridors of group homes to the halls of Columbia and Stanford, EMERGENCE is a coming-of-age tale where heartbreak and humor meet the scientific wonder of modern artificial intelligence.

🔗 Preorder: tinyurl.com/fzcxb5ea

5 months ago 73 16 3 1
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Flexible inference for animal learning rules using neural networks Understanding how animals learn is a central challenge in neuroscience, with growing relevance to the development of animal- or human-aligned artificial intelligence. However, existing approaches tend...

(1/n) Presenting our NeurIPS’25 work at #cosyne2026 poster 3-109
We introduce a flexible framework to infer how animals learn new decision-making tasks from scratch without assuming REINFORCE/Q-learning.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.04661
Joint w/ @vgeadah.bsky.social and @jpillowtime.bsky.social

1 month ago 28 5 1 1
Postdoc Position Open! The Neural Dynamics (CATNIP) Lab, led by Memming Park at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, is seeking a Postdoctoral Fellow to extract organizing principles of neural comput...

Are you at #cosyne2026 and looking for a postdoc position? CATNIP = Neural Dynamics Lab is hiring! catniplab.github.io/postdoc-hiri...

1 month ago 16 7 1 0
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22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

1 month ago 159 70 7 18

A paid summer internship is available in Microsoft Research NYC for a *PhD student later in their degree*, with experience designing human questionnaires/experiments, collecting data on prolific, running statistical analysis, and writing papers. If you know exceptional candidates please ping me. 🙏

1 month ago 39 13 4 1
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New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6....

As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18

1 month ago 137 48 7 1
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Join us at TENSS 2026 to open black boxes, explain how things/brains work and debate the impact (or lack or it) of various new technologies on understanding of the brain and on society. tenss.ro Apply by: March 15th!

1 month ago 18 17 0 0

Excited to announce our new study in which we convert mouse neural responses into natural language (English) descriptions of odorants. Comments, suggestions are highly appreciated as always: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1 month ago 9 2 0 0

ah, the perfect motivation for my fruit fly modeling grants!

1 month ago 1 0 0 0
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#neuroAI #neurojobs #compneuro #bioAI #gradschool @cshlaboratory.bsky.social @tonyzador.bsky.social

1 month ago 1 0 0 0

The Cowley Group at CSHL has an opening for a bioAI PhD student to start Fall 2026 to work on closed-loop AI models for visual processing (see below). You *must* have a Master's degree in a quant/eng/cs field.

www.cshl.edu/phd-program/...

Please reach out to me if interested!
I'll be at Cosyne.

1 month ago 11 10 1 1
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Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico?

In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony.

It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small!

rdcu.be/e5H8G

1 month ago 127 47 3 4
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New paper out!!!
Such as humans and rats, we showed that birds visual system (🐣) is tuned to specific pixel correlations from hatching: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

1 month ago 11 6 0 0
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Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

RIP redundancy reduction?

Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1 month ago 69 25 2 1

Proud to be a collaborator on this paper on compact deep neural network models of V4, with Ben Cowley (@benjocowley.bsky.social), Pati Stan, & Matt Smith, now finally out in print (by which I mean online).

1 month ago 23 1 0 0