How do 🐁deal with complex landscapes? Turns out they learn a lot very quickly. We think they do this by learning a set of repeated sparse paths, which form a type of compressed world model. Joint work with the Hermundstad lab, led by Tzuhsuan Ma and Alison Comrie: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I wanted to highlight the work of Alison Comrie et al. that recently came out in Neuron and I don’t think it is getting enough attention: paper: cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(26)00674-4 #neuroskyence

Highlighting a couple of lovely behavior-focused preprints from some of the newer rodent neuro labs at Janelia: mice hunting crickets in the @emilyjanedennis.bsky.social lab (tinyurl.com/5fenwwh8) and exploring structured, complex environments in the @jvoigts.bsky.social lab (tinyurl.com/4ewsvvhw)

We are thrilled 🥳 to share that we’re joining forces with @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social to establish a joint research unit, @cmc-unit.bsky.social integrating embodied and natural decision making across species! We also have open PhD and postdoc positions (check below for more info) 🎉

CMC Unit@cmc-unit.bsky.social · 2w ago

We, the Natural Decision Making Group and the Embodied Decision Making Group, are joining forces to establish the CMC Unit, a joint research unit to uncover computational, biological, and ecological principles underlying adaptive decision-making. You can read more about us here: cmc-unit.org

Grateful to have been selected as an Allen Institute Next Generation Leader - and for the opportunity to learn from and engage with this wonderful community!

allen institute@alleninstitute.org · 3w ago

Meet the 2026 cohort of Next Generation Leaders. This program recognizes emerging early career researchers in bioscience and is designed to foster community, exchange of ideas, innovation, and collaboration to make a broad, transformational impact on the future of science.

🚨 New Walton × Bogacz Collab Preprint! POV: dopamine refuses to have just one job.🧠 DLS dopamine carries distinct reward AND action prediction errors — parallel teaching signals that could support value learning and habit formation. Enjoyed working with Yuhao, Juan Carlos, et al. on this one!

Dopamine dips during unrewarded actions promote punishment-resistant reward seeking https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.01.742224v1

Ecological Visual Processing in the Mouse - with @michaelgoard.bsky.social @crisniell.bsky.social @mbeyeler.bsky.social Visual computations that are engaged in ecological contexts: active sensing, motion processing, scene analysis, distance estimation, and spatial perception. doi.org/10.1146/annu...

#fens2026 has revealed to me a real diversity in how neuroscientists use travelators.

📜 Project Showcase 🛠️ pyControl: Open source, Python-based, behavioural experiment control. 👩‍💻 🧑‍💻 Developed by Thomas Akam 👀 To learn more about it: open-neuroscience.com/en/post/pyco... #OpenSoftware #OpenScience #OpenSource

Looking forward to speaking at Barrels Meeting this Saturday, and a poster this Tuesday afternoon at #FENS2026 - PS02-07PM-083. Presenting mostly published work but sneaking in some new CA1 data/analyses that I’m excited about and keen to discuss…!

Excited to share our new paper: "The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice,". Out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social 🧵1/9 www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice

Biological sciences; Behavioral neuroscience; Laboratory animal science

cell.com

This paper is an absolutely beautiful combination of a deep set of cognitive ideas, a super creative task, a surprisingly impressive behaviour, and an elegant modelling framework. One of my favourite things in the last year.

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 4mo ago

And here's another for all the ventral striatum / olfactory tubercle folks. It's hard not to love the Calleja and interface islands.

How do brains plan actions towards goals? To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵 Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share our new paper accepted at ICML 2026 with @tyrellturing.bsky.social and Doina Precup! 🇰🇷 See you in Seoul. A major challenge in continual reinforcement learning is balancing: • plasticity (learning new things) • stability (not forgetting old ones) 🧵 1/15

1/ 🚨🚨Preprint alert! "Perfect" isn't always smart 🧠. Anyone can tell apart two stimuli (including our mice). But how do we extract rules that apply to new stimuli? 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @marius10p.bsky.social @computingnature.bsky.social #neuroAI #neuroscience #AI

@fluketc.bsky.social and @dudman.bsky.social have hit it out the park again. In my (perhaps biased) opinion this - along with their previous papers - is field-defining work. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Reward magnitude determines reinforcement learning efficiency

Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...

science.org

Story time friends... Ring attractor networks rely on fine-tuned symmetric connectivity. The fly head direction network has ring attractor dynamics but heterogeneous connectivity. How is this possible? 1/🧵 Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It’s very fun to analyze other people’s data for your favorite model and theory, but data reuse actually takes a huge amount of effort. We tested if current agentic AI can help with data reuse. Conclusion: it definitely can, but requires careful human supervision. #AIforScience #compneuro #neuroAI

Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10

🚨 Ever wanted a simple way to control the activity of thousands of neurons? We introduce an all-optical raster photostimulation method to do just that! w/ @computingnature.bsky.social @marius10p.bsky.social #FluorescenceFriday #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

Really pleased that this work with @dudman.bsky.social is now out in Neuron: A global dopaminergic learning rate enables adaptive foraging across many options

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Reminder that it's possible to set up a free personal website using GitHub pages: docs.github.com/en/pages Really straightforward to then use Jekyll to make something relatively nice (with the aid of your chosen LLM, of course...) Just updated my own using this approach: lauralgrima.github.io

GitHub Pages documentation - GitHub Docs

GitHub Pages turns any GitHub repository into a live website—no separate hosting required.

docs.github.com

Who else is going to #FENS2026 in July?

Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social. AI is now offering neuroscience the same deal. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...

Can AI do neuroscience without understanding?

Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles. Artificial intelligence is now offering neuroscience the same deal.

thetransmitter.org

After three years of working on this review with my collaborator Emily Dennis (Janelia Farm), it is finally in press. The review provides an overview and our personal reflections on what constitutes an integrative approach to neurobiology of foraging. Enjoy www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Neurobiology of Foraging: An Integrative Approach

Foraging, defined as the search for food to sustain one's energetic needs, is a fundamental behavior performed by almost all animals to survive in their environment. Foraging involves a variety o...

annualreviews.org

I like neuroscience and history, and over a decade ago I started a list of neurohistory events that influence my scientific views. I've been meaning to format as a timeline for a while, and doomscroll prevention + GenAI left me no excuse: neurojak.github.io/neurohistory/

How does an animal choose between exploring for a better food source and taking advantage of a known one? Our recent work in Current Biology demonstrates how recent feeding and metabolic state dynamically influence fly local search. bit.ly/3PfrIv3 #Science #Neurosky #Foraging #Drosophila

New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18