Sam McDougle

@actlab.bsky.social

psychology prof @yale http://actcompthink.org

Our paper is out in Nature, congrats to Qiyu, An et al! By stimulating ~20 motor cortex neurons carefully selected based on their activity, we could induce learned population activity and, sometimes, the movement itself, depending on the brain's state. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Targeted stimulation of motor cortex ensembles drives learned movements - Nature

Optogenetic stimulation of motor-cortex neuron ensembles shows that precisely timed activity in the primary motor cortex can generate learned neural patterns and movements, demonstrating an active rol...

nature.com

The one-day satellite meeting for #NCMSev27 has just been announced and the program includes a lot of cool science that I'm sure will motivate many you to submit your research and propose interesting team sessions! More below 👇

Society for the Neural Control of Movement@ncmsociety.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Save the Date for #NCMSev27! Join us in Sevilla, Spain April 26 - 30 at the Melia Sevilla. Stay tuned to the website for keydates, call for submissions, and more. ncm-society.org

📣 Save the date! RLDM 2027, the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making, is coming to Paris, July 6-9, 2027 🎉 Stay tuned for submission deadlines and more updates on our website rldm.org 👀

Bild

NSF has reduced the research budget for all atmospheric, ocean, and earth sciences by ~80%. 80%! A lot of us will not be conducting new research or training new students for the foreseeable future.

New preprint! 🥳 How do we discover what to do when a movement goes wrong? Answer: hypothesis testing (HT) - testing and evaluating candidate motor solutions based on sensory evidence. HT explains how we explore, and when exploration gives way to an “aha!” moment.

Understanding Strategic Motor Learning as a Process of Hypothesis Testing

Multiple learning processes contribute to successful goal-directed actions under changing physiological states, biomechanical constraints, and environmental contexts. Among these, explicit strategies ...

biorxiv.org

A