Excited to speak at CalTech and hear the exciting work from others: wellbeing-agency.jp/symposium2026/
The 2nd International Symposium for Well-being and Agency
wellbeing-agency.jp
Monosov Lab
@monosovlab.bsky.social
Studying the algorithms and circuits of decision making, emotion, and biological and artificial learning at Johns Hopkins
Where does curiosity come from? Neuroscientist @jenbussell.bsky.social wants to know. She found that mice, like us, seek information with no external benefit. Her new Nature Neuroscience research links this desire for knowledge to cells in the brain's orbitofrontal cortex. See tinyurl.com/3xjt8e5c
Ecology of curiosity framework for adaptive and maladaptive human–AI ecosystems --a generalist article with psychology and neuroscience (this is a companion to the Arxiv I recently posted) doi.org/10.31234/osf...
OSF
doi.org
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
Go Julia Pai, Fatih Sogukpinar et al. Heavily revised work on astrocytes role in learning. Incredibly grateful for the team's hard work on this. Extended biology and theory now added! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Ventral striatal astrocytes contribute to reinforcement learning
Astrocytes influence synaptic plasticity and neuronal function through astrocytic calcium dynamics (ACD). However, astrocytes’ contribution to cognitive operations like reinforcement learning (RL) rem...
biorxiv.org
New beautiful normative/theory paper from Ethan Bromberg-Martin with Josh Merel Why are we curious? What is the origin of our non instrumental seeming information preference? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Why do we seek information about the future? On the origins of subjective value without instrumental value
Why do we want to know the future? Humans and many animals pay for information to predict uncertain rewards, even when they cannot control them. The reason for this conserved yet seemingly paradoxical...
biorxiv.org
back at revising this beast on astrocytes and learning....
Monosov Lab@monosovlab.bsky.social · 10mo agoHow do non-neuronal CNS cells called astrocytes contribute to cognition & computation? See our preprint Headed by my students Julia Pai and Fatih Sogukpinar, also working with Hiratani, Pignatelli, Papouin, Frank, and Ching labs. This was a huge effort www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
happy 2 see Dr Okihide Hikosaka elected to NAS Okihide has done an amazing amount of true discovery Think big contributions to understanding of mechanisms of saccadic control, chunking and skill formation, reinforcement learning, and more! Also a great mentor and friend.
Congratulations to my great students Arman Hatami and Romina Aalishah on their new study of machine unlearning and forgetting accepted. arxiv.org/abs/2604.15166 This has had clear implications for ML and neuroscience (albeit from different angles), and we continue this work in both disciplines….
Class Unlearning via Depth-Aware Removal of Forget-Specific Directions
Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted knowledge from a trained model without the cost of retraining from scratch. In class unlearning, however, reducing accuracy on forget classes does not necess...
arxiv.org
I am deeply grateful to the Bloomberg Endowment for supporting both our research and broader vision! We hope that our work will contribute to next generation of psychiatry treatments, bci, and ai development.
JHU Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships@jhu-bdps.bsky.social · 4mo agoWelcome internationally recognized neuroscientist, Ilya Monosov, who joins @jhu.edu as the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Curiosity and Intelligence. hub.jhu.edu/2026/04/03/n...
! New paper from the lab ! How does novelty impact value-based decision making ? What are the circuits and what mechanisms do they implement? Congratulations to Dr. Takaya Ogasawara and team www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
Temporal-orbitofrontal pathway regulates choices across physical reward and visual novelty
Novelty can directly impact valuation of future outcomes, affecting how we choose among rewards such as food or money. This is the case even when novelty is objectively valueless. Here, Ogasawara et a...
cell.com
Nature research paper: Integrator dynamics in the cortico-basal ganglia loop for flexible motor timing go.nature.com/4oX2rmq
Integrator dynamics in the cortico-basal ganglia loop for flexible motor timing - Nature
How the mouse frontal cortex and striatum interact to implement integrator dynamics controlling movement timing is explored.
go.nature.com
How do non-neuronal CNS cells called astrocytes contribute to cognition & computation? See our preprint Headed by my students Julia Pai and Fatih Sogukpinar, also working with Hiratani, Pignatelli, Papouin, Frank, and Ching labs. This was a huge effort www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Ventral striatal astrocytes contribute to reinforcement learning
Astrocytes influence synaptic plasticity and neuronal function through astrocytic calcium dynamics (ACD). However, astrocytes contribution to cognitive operations like reinforcement learning (RL) rema...
biorxiv.org
Some professional news : My team is moving to Johns Hopkins University this Summer. I am deeply grateful to Washington University for supporting us since 2014. It has been an amazing journey full of brilliant colleagues and friends.
New work! How does perceptual novelty impact the value of (physical) rewards: what are the underlying algorithms and neural mechanisms? The answers may help to construct smarter AIs and to understand how and why novelty seeking breaks in psychiatric disorders. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Temporal-orbitofrontal pathway regulates choices across physical reward and visual novelty
Perceptually novel objects have profound impacts on our daily decisions. People often pay to try novel meals over familiar ones, or to see novel visual scenes at art exhibits and travel destinations. ...
biorxiv.org
First blue sky post is to celebrate! Incredibly proud of Dr Julia Pai. Fantastic defense and pioneering project on non-neuronal cells in Reinforcement Learning! Now almost off to her next chapter. Paper in prep!
