Schematic of the early olfactory circuit with local interneurons inhibiting projection neurons. Above local neurons, a simplified depiction of a curved background manifold with a new odor that has an orthogonal component to the manifold. The circuit receives a mixture of background and new odor (apple) and outputs the new odor only.

Why do we stop smelling odors that linger? In our new @prxlife.bsky.social paper with @pfrancois.bsky.social, @gautamreddy.bsky.social, and Massimo Vergassola, we develop a manifold learning theory of this olfactory habituation process in fluctuating environments.
🔗 doi.org/10.1103/q62z...
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Congrats!!

Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

Differential kinematic coding in sensorimotor striatum across behavioral domains reflects different contributions to movement - Nature Neuroscience Hardcastle and Marshall et al. show that striatal function is domain specific, required for task-related but not spontaneously expressed movements. This functional distinction is reflected in starkly ...

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online!

Links:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
rdcu.be/eAcN7

In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill?

Read more below to find out 👇

Is there a pre-print online? Would love to read it -- having a hard time accessing it though

Breaking the barrier between theorists and experimentalists Many neuroscience students are steeped in an experiment-first style of thinking. Let’s not forget how theory can guide experiments.

Sam Gershman writes beautifully about how theory-free neuroscience prevents the field from reaching its promise. Beautiful and true. Most folks do not test hypotheses. Running a NHST does not a hypothesis make. www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

The NIH overhead cut doesn't just hurt universities.

It's deadly to the US economy.

The US is a world leader in tech due to the ecosystem that NIH and NSF propel. It drives innovation for tech transfer, creates a highly-skilled sci/tech workforce, and fosters academic/industry crossfertilization.

Reconciling time and prediction error theories of associative learning Learning involves forming associations between sensory events that have a consistent temporal relationship. Influential theories based on prediction errors explain numerous behavioral and neurobiologi...

@noehamou.bsky.social and @gautamreddy.bsky.social (with a little bit of help from me) have written a really interesting theoretical paper on associative learning (in particular Pavlovian conditioning):
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Extraordinarily detailed article here by @mliebreich.bsky.social - if you're interested at all in the energy impact of AI data center buildouts I recommend spending some time with this, I learned a ton from it

Adaptive algorithms for shaping behavior bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Excited to see this work out! Work on automatic shaping of animal behavior (and artificial agents), led by the amazing @gautamreddy.bsky.social #neuroscience #psychscisky 🧪