Nice work adding to the mounting evidence that the ON-OFF division is not so straightforward. It could explain why we could change the ON-OFF selectivity of ganglion cells by changing the visual context in this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Context-dependent selectivity to natural images in the retina - Nature Communications

Ganglion cells classically respond to either light increase (ON) or decrease (OFF). Here, the authors show that during natural scene stimulation, a single ganglion cell can switch between ON and OFF d...

nature.com

Tom Baden@neurofishh.bsky.social · 3mo ago

How is the ON and OFF pathway split in the visual system? 🤔 The textbook standard, that bipolar cells are separated simply by the glutamate receptors they express, might be due for an update....a short 🧵

Talking about blue brain, digital twins and the likes: The danger of building a brain from scratch: trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/the-danger...

The danger of building a brain from scratch

Having a model of the brain that works in many cases seems like a good idea. Is it really ?

trialsanderrors.substack.com

How does our visual system process natural scenes ? How can we approach this question ? Happy to share this recent review written with Samuele Virgili where we ask these questions at the level of the retina. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Retinal processing of natural scenes: challenges ahead

While substantial knowledge exists about the way the retina processes simple stimuli, our understanding of how the retina processes natural stimuli re…

sciencedirect.com

Exposition Bridget Riley et Seurat au musée d’Orsay jusqu’au 26 janvier, l’artiste presque centenaire, gloire de l’art cinétique, eu la révélation des interactions des couleurs en copiant Seurat en 1959. L’occasion rare de faire l’expérience sensible des liens reliant ces 2 géants de la perception

This head is spinning continuously, but we see it rotating back and forth... ...presumably because of our strong prior expectation that faces are convex. This is a very nice example of the Hollow-Face illusion promoted by Richard Gregory: www.richardgregory.org/experiments/

Excellent work @victorcalbiagueg.bsky.social !!!

The Journal of Physiology@jphysiol.bsky.social · 9mo ago

In this #TopicalReview, Victor Calbiague-Garcia of sorbonne-universite.fr et al. review current knowledge of #amacrine cells & discuss how emerging approaches are advancing our understanding of their function 👁️ 🐁 🔗 Read it here: physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/...

Excited to share our paper now published in Cell! 'Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background' Huge thanks to @neurofishh.bsky.social & @teuler.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social @cp-cell.bsky.social 👇🏻 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background

Vertebrate eyes first evolved in water, where spectral content rapidly fades with distance. Zebrafish exploit this loss by antagonizing cone signals to suppress the background, pointing to distance es...

cell.com

This is really cool work! Congrats, Olivier, and the whole team!

Olivier Marre@oliviermarre.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Happy to share my first work with a connection to myopia, a collaboration with EssilorLuxottica www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Happy to share my first work with a connection to myopia, a collaboration with EssilorLuxottica www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nonlinear spatial integration allows the retina to detect the sign of defocus in natural scenes

The retina can easily detect whether the eye is too small or too big thanks to the imperfections of the eye optics.

science.org

The final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!) Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov.... 1/11

11/n This way, this inhibition “piggybacks” on existing circuits. Revealing that the retina doesn’t build new circuits for every computation — it repurposes existing ones, using limited wiring to perform multiple computations efficiently. ♻️

10/n Mechanistically, we propose that ON stimulation in the surround may trigger crossover inhibition that suppresses wide-field GABAergic amacrine cells—normally responsible for surround suppression—thereby disinhibiting distant OFF ganglion cells.

6/n This setup let us directly stimulate individual rod bipolar cells while recording retinal output in real time. Result? Activating single RBCs drove responses in OFF ganglion cells far beyond their receptive field center 💥

5/n So, to tackle this we combined: ✨ Optogenetics — to control specific neurons ✨ Two-photon holography — to activate single cells precisely ✨ Multi-electrode recordings — to monitor hundreds of ganglion cells simultaneously

3/n Our hunch: a circuit best known for rod vision — the rod bipolar (RBC) → AII amacrine pathway — might also shape these surround responses under brighter conditions. 🌙➡️💡

🚨 New preprint out from our lab! 📄 The Rod Bipolar Cell Pathway Contributes to Surround Responses in OFF Retinal Ganglion Cells 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Rod Bipolar Cell Pathway Contributes To Surround Responses In OFF Retinal Ganglion Cells

Sensory neurons can be influenced by stimuli beyond their receptive field center, yet the mechanisms underlying this surround modulation remain poorly understood. In the retina, many OFF ganglion cell...

biorxiv.org

We’re hiring! We’re looking for two RAs to study neuroplasticity in sight loss, sight rescue and development in children and adults @ucl.ac.uk using a wide range of neuroimaging and behavioral methods. Please help spread the word! Apply by 16 Oct! t.ly/q3aYe #neurojobs #NeuroSkyence

Research Assistant at UCL

Recruiting now: Research Assistant on jobs.ac.uk. Click for details and explore more academic job opportunities on the top job board

t.ly

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

If you are looking for a book to read and are interested in computational/systems neuroscience or AI, I have a suggestion: trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/a-recommen...

A recommended summer read: "The mechanization of the mind"

If you are working in systems or computational neuroscience, or AI, I would strongly recommend to read “The mechanization of the mind” by Jean-Pierre Dupuy.

trialsanderrors.substack.com

A very clear, detailed, and fair account on the (obscure?) French way to distribute positions in academia, and then manage to actually do some research! Thanks Olivier

Olivier Marre@oliviermarre.bsky.social · last yr.

In case this is helpful for anyone, here is a post on how to get a job in french academia : trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/getting-a-... Aimed at non-french scientists who are curious, but french ones may find it useful too.

In case this is helpful for anyone, here is a post on how to get a job in french academia : trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/getting-a-... Aimed at non-french scientists who are curious, but french ones may find it useful too.

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics Today in bioRxiv 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

Some people see spontaneous faint flickering flashes in their visual field, a condition known as Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS, not to be confused with @vssmtg.bsky.social). Maybe a visual equivalent of the auditory tinnitus? Here is a very nice study from the lab of @sengelweb.bsky.social.

PsyArXivBot@psyarxivbot.bsky.social · last yr.

Visual Snow is Susceptible to the Motion Aftereffect: http://osf.io/u6fcx_v2/

Seeking input: A standardized nomenclature for the rods and cones of the vertebrate retina A number of us have been working on a proposal to bring various disconnected naming systems for the vertebrate rods and cones across species into alignment. The basic proposal looks like this:

If you are interested in the contribution of Ibn al-Haytham to vision science, and if you don’t mind reading French, I recommend the book of Michel Imbert “La fin du regard éclairant” www.vrin.fr/livre/978271...

La fin du regard éclairant - le Traité de l'Optique de Ibn al-Haytham : une révolution dans les sciences de la vision au XIe siècle | Collection Mathesis

Découvrez l'ouvrage La fin du regard éclairant | Collection Mathesis

vrin.fr

Steve Most@sbmost.bsky.social · 2y ago

Cognitive psych is often traced back to the 1950s. Psychology is often traced to Wundt's lab in 1879. Textbooks speak of "proto-psychologists" like Fechner & Helmholtz in the 1800s... Westerners all. Have you heard about Ibn al-Haytham, whose work predated them by 100s of years? 1/4

as a side effect of a sort of "false-fusion" cos the binoc pair acts like a spatial filter. A binoc extension of the previous filter model does the trick, reproduces the newborn results. The results don't imply an "innate neural face representation". The inference was flawed. doi.org/10.1111/desc...

Staring us in the face? An embodied theory of innate face preference

Human expertise in face perception grows over development, but even within minutes of birth, infants exhibit an extraordinary sensitivity to face-like stimuli. The dominant theory accounts for innate....

doi.org

New post: What chess (may have) taught me about neuroscience. trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/what-chess...

Good resolution of 2025: start a blog for thoughts that cannot go in papers (too speculative or preliminary).

Besides being beautiful, the different grouping principles on display across the different artists here is fascinating. It would be fun to see how consistent each person is in terms of how they approach lots of different patterns! #VisionScience

Angie Grace@angiegracecoloring.bsky.social · 2y ago

For @bjbalas.bsky.social - screenshot examples where a single line work drawing and the same palette of colors are interpreted differently by different colorists. The fourth picture actually had me double checking to make sure that really is the same pattern.

Clever study that explores the debate between those who claim that color categories are 'innate' and those who argue that they are dependent on language. It turns out that monkeys, unlike humans, do not have consensus color categories, suggesting cognitive mechanisms such as language are required.🧪🧠

Joey Saito@jsaito25.bsky.social · 2y ago

The origin of color categories | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...