Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.

Neural timescales from a computational perspective - Nature Neuroscience

This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...

nature.com

Dopamine neurons are heterogeneous, but their diffuse axons are homogenizing. What does this mean for RL models? Stop by poster 362 at #FENS2026 this morning to find out! "Multi-timescale reward prediction learning dynamics with entangled connectivity between the striatum and the dopamine system."

Come see this paper at ICML 2026 tomorrow (July 7th)! Poster number 613 at the 2pm poster session:)

Ezekiel Williams@ezekielwilliams.bsky.social · 2mo ago

1/7 Excited to share my last PhD article, just accepted to ICML 2026! In it, we (me, Alexandre Payeur, Guillaume Lajoie) used dynamical systems theory to study "local" learning in linear recurrent neural networks. See link for the paper, and thread for a brief summary. arxiv.org/abs/2606.00243

Great opportunity to work with a group that's very productive yet somehow also easygoing! To get an idea of Roxana's interests check out her recent review, just out in Nature Neuroscience: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Roxana Zeraati@roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · last mo.

We (@neuroprinciplist.bsky.social & I) will soon open joint PhD & postdoc positions on cross-species mechanisms of different adaptive behaviors. If you’re interested and would like to chat during #FENS2026, drop me a message :)

We (@neuroprinciplist.bsky.social & I) will soon open joint PhD & postdoc positions on cross-species mechanisms of different adaptive behaviors. If you’re interested and would like to chat during #FENS2026, drop me a message :)

Just in time for the start of next week's Braitenberg 100 symposium, I'm excited to share "Dopamine: From prediction to error," a site I built to better understand where the dopamine RPE hypothesis came from and where it might be headed. efharkin.com/s/dopamine-h... 1/3

Some incredibly exciting news that still feels a bit surreal: I am starting my research group @mpicybernetics.bsky.social! The best part? We are hiring at all levels! Curious about the science we plan to tackle, read along :) #NeuroSky

How are the fluctuations in electric field organized across the whole brain? We analyzed the 3.4 M samples from the international brain lab using a combination of deep learning and graph theory. We found a surprising structure made of communities and landmarks. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

What can rock-paper-scissors tell us about what I think that you think that I'm thinking? Check out this cool work to find out! 🤛🤛📄

Niklas Buergi@niklasbuergi.bsky.social · 5mo ago

How does the brain decide which mental strategy to use when inferring others' beliefs? Excited to (finally!) see my first first-author paper out @natneuro.nature.com Summary below 🧵 #CogSci #CogNeuro www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reproducibility challenge: How much of your paper could someone simulate for a lab journal club? observablehq.com/d/95e1ff1680...

I am excited to share my PhD work on head-direction cells recorded in the wild, now published in @science.org, where we recorded neurons in bats flying outdoors on an island. doi.org/10.1126/sci... With @ray-neuro.bsky.social, Shir Maimon, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky and many others

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.” Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior. #cogsci #neuroskyence

This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful. When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"

Malcolm Campbell@malcolmgcampbell.bsky.social · 11mo ago

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

The Sosa Lab website is now live! www.sosaneurolab.com We will be seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join the growing team! If you are a rodent neuroscientist and interested in doing systems neuro work in the mountains 🏔️, please check out the "Join" page.

Sosa Lab

sosaneurolab.com

A nice reminder about the importance of being critical and kind in science. rdcu.be/eEzd7

Agree to disagree

Nature Chemistry - Science is about discovering new knowledge, so, logically, there will be disagreement. Shira Joudan contemplates how disagreements can be useful, and how to deal with them when...

rdcu.be

So happy to see this work out! 🥳 Huge thanks to our two amazing reviewers who pushed us to make the paper much stronger. A truly joyful collaboration with @lucasgruaz.bsky.social, @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social, and Johanni Brea! 🥰 Tweeprint on an earlier version: bsky.app/profile/modi... 🧠🧪👩‍🔬

Open Mind@openmindjournal.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Looking forward to attending #CCN2025 for the first time and presenting the first steps of my postdoc project! If you’re interested in how learning the temporal structure of the environment affects foraging decisions and how we’re testing this in a naturalistic experiment come by poster B90, Wed.

🚨Pre-print alert🚨 We stimulated serotonin with optogenetics while doing large-scale Neuropixel recordings across the mouse brain. We found strong widespread modulation of neural activity, but no effect on the choices of the mouse 🐭 How is this possible? Strap in! (1/9) 👇🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Serotonin drives choice-independent reconfiguration of distributed neural activity

Serotonin (5-HT) is a central neuromodulator which is implicated in, amongst other functions, cognitive flexibility. 5-HT is released from the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) throughout nearly the entire f...

doi.org

Finally published: “Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures” www.nature.com/articles/s41... Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations

Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research app...

nature.com

I've been watching the debate over "representations" in neuroscience 🍿 and I wanted to suggest a thought experiment: Suppose a driver sees a 🛑 and this causes vision neurons to spike in a characteristic way, but the driver blows through the intersection. Is the stop sign *represented* in the brain?

⏰ Check out this inspiring pair of articles from @paulmasset.bsky.social and Margarida Sousa! Some dopamine neurons care about rewards far in the future more than others, allowing the brain to learn the timing of future rewards. Congrats to the authors! 🍾 🔓 links: rdcu.be/epxkE rdcu.be/epxkG

A multidimensional distributional map of future reward in dopamine neurons

Nature - An algorithm called time–magnitude reinforcement learning (TMRL) extends distributional reinforcement learning to take account of reward time and magnitude, and behavioural and...

rdcu.be

1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance? Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by @jrbch.bsky.social

Ugh… there’s also what I call messianic AI, the fantasy that AI will “solve” science. Treating science like a vending machine for solitons/profit & scientists as human cogs replaceable by machinery. But Science is a living culture of critical discussion, mentorship, shared community values &methods.

Pandemic project ready to share! Short movies (many of which are emotional) you can use as stimuli: rdcu.be/ekNMo Stimuli, data, and code: osf.io/hk32g/?view_... #psynomBRM

The Second Database of Emotional Videos from Ottawa (DEVO-2): Over 1300 brief video clips rated on valence, arousal, impact, and familiarity - Behavior Research Methods

We introduce an updated set of video clips for research on emotion and its relations with perception, cognition, and behavior. These 1380 brief video clips each portray realistic episodes. They were s...

link.springer.com

Sometimes negative results are also beautiful.

TIL that at certain journals the date your paper is published online might be very different from the date it appears in print. Unrelated, is there anyone whose work was published in the March 27 print edition of Nature who'd like several copies to share with supportive family members?

Most simulators for time-series data (e.g., numerical solvers for differential equations) are Markovian-- this can be exploited for efficient simulation-based inference on time-series data! Talk to Manuel and Shoji at #ICLR2025, or read the paper ⬇️!

Machine Learning in Science@mackelab.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to present our work on compositional SBI for time series at #ICLR2025 tomorrow! If you're interested in simulation-based inference for time series, come chat with Manuel Gloeckler or Shoji Toyota at Poster #420, Saturday 10:00–12:00 in Hall 3. 📰: arxiv.org/abs/2411.02728

Attention climate scholars seeking to leave the US: Next year the University of Ottawa will be seeking int'l candidates for a Canada Excellence Research Chair in "Climate and Societal Solutions" (broadly defined) They'll seek established scholars with global reach in this area (see below)...

Many people (myself included), note the lack of top-down feedback in deep NN models of the brain. Mashbayar has come to the rescue! She built a code-base for making models with top-down feedback. Check out her paper at @elife.bsky.social showing the impact of FB on audio-visual integration. 🧠📈 🧪

Mashbayar Tugsbayar@tmshbr.bsky.social · last yr.

Top-down feedback is ubiquitous in the brain and computationally distinct, but rarely modeled in deep neural networks. What happens when a DNN has biologically-inspired top-down feedback? 🧠📈 Our new paper explores this: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

When a scientific idea is ambiguous, is it good to err on the side of agreeing with it? Sometimes I read discussions like "Our data are broadly consistent with X and Y," where X and Y are plausibly contradictory but vague enough that there's wiggle room.