Arthur Prat
@arthurpr4t.bsky.social
Computational cognitive neuroscience. Perception, representation, inference and decision-making. Postdoc at Harvard with Sam Gershman. http://arthurprat.com
calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!
To adapt to a new prior, tuning curves should "move" toward more frequent stimuli ('prior attraction'). But in adaptation studies they are shown to move away from the more frequent stimuli ('adapter repulsion'). Oh also how do tuning curves move at all?? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Fast efficient coding and sensory adaptation in gain-adaptive recurrent networks - Nature Communications
How sensory systems rapidly adapt to changing stimulus statistics remains unclear. Here the authors show that gain adaptation in recurrent networks can implement fast efficient coding, unifying prior ...
nature.com
These days the expected value of the Massachusetts Megabucks lottery is positive, so I expect every economist and decision theorist in Massachusetts will get their ticket. If you don't buy, clearly something must be wrong with your utility function
The "Version of Record" of my paper with Mike Woodford is finally there. I am very glad with this paper that points to new laws of psychophysics, which we derived from a carefully considered principle of endogenous efficient coding.
Endogenous precision of the number sense
A theory of efficient coding wherein the precision of representations is endogenous, task-dependent, and prior-dependent predicts scaling laws for imprecision and is supported by numerosity perception...
elifesciences.org
Isaiah Berlin on FDR in the 1930s: "... to construct a regime which should provide for greater economic equality and social justice - ideals which were the best part of the tradition of American life - without altering the basis of freedom and democracy in his country." Where is our Roosevelt!
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...
Junior Theoretical Neuroscientists Workshop
Junior Theoretical Neuroscientists Workshop on Simons Foundation
simonsfoundation.org
Just posted an update of this study, where we show how the receptive fields of number-encoding neural populations shift and rescale with the prior — "distributed range adaptation" — in line with (dynamic) efficient coding, and predictive of behavior. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Efficient coding theories often implicitly or explicitly assume slow changes in tuning (e.g., through synaptic plasticity). Arthur Prat-Carrabin has collected psychophysical data showing that it can be fast, and this can be explained by a gain-adaptive RNN: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Fast efficient coding and sensory adaptation in gain-adaptive recurrent networks
As the statistics of sensory environments often change, neural sensory systems must adapt to maintain useful representations. Efficient coding prescribes that neuronal tuning curves should be optimize...
biorxiv.org
