Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

A synaptic locus of song learning - Nature

Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...

nature.com

More control wires enable finer control. The Banerjee lab's findings on the neuroanatomical underpinnings of vocal dexterity neatly tie in with a recurring motif in brain evolution: pre-existing pathways can be selectively expanded to increase sensorimotor control and expand behavioral repertoires.

Cedric Boeckx@cedricboeckx.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“Specific expansion of motor cortical projections in a singing mouse” Great new work by @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social E. Isco @cliffscience.bsky.social @xmikezheng20.bsky.social @tonyzador.bsky.social & colleagues on the neural basis of vocal dexterity, now out in @nature.com 🧪🧠

Where does learning through imitation happen in the brain? In juvenile zebra finches, we pinpoint a synaptic locus of song learning in a cortico-basal ganglia circuit and leverage this localization to measure the timescale of consolidation and make birds learn faster! #neuroskyence (1/14)

1/4 New preprint! We designed an open-source system for auditory brainstem response (ABR), a research & clinical auditory test. Costs $400 to build (vs $10K to buy a proprietary one) and works great! All open-source if you want to make one for your lab or classroom. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

As a longtime fan of cool papers in @currentbiology.bsky.social, I am really thrilled to see this out! This study sets the stage for understanding the origins of novel (vocal) behaviors. Big shout out to the main architects of this work @xmikezheng20.bsky.social and @cliffscience.bsky.social

Cedric Boeckx@cedricboeckx.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Great @currentbiology.bsky.social study by @xmikezheng20.bsky.social @cliffscience.bsky.social @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social 🧪🧠🐭🎶 Vocal repertoire expansion in singing mice by co-opting a conserved midbrain circuit node www.cell.com/current-biol...

Great @currentbiology.bsky.social study by @xmikezheng20.bsky.social @cliffscience.bsky.social @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social 🧪🧠🐭🎶 Vocal repertoire expansion in singing mice by co-opting a conserved midbrain circuit node www.cell.com/current-biol...

Vocal repertoire expansion in singing mice by co-opting a conserved midbrain circuit node

Zheng and Harpole et al. show that singing mice produce two major vocal modes: ancestral USVs and novel songs that follow a linearly decelerating rhythm. Although acoustically distinct, songs and USVs...

cell.com

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience

Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

nature.com

Super excited to share the first part of my thesis work! Perhaps how you might be able to both recognize someone’s voice *and* understand what they’re saying, we find that both social identity and vocalization category can be decoded from gerbil auditory cortex activity👂🧠 tinyurl.com/4fba6wk4

Less than a week left to apply!

Ari Strandburg-Peshkin@arispeshkin.bsky.social · 10mo ago

⭐PhD position available!⭐ Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Evolutionary expansion of the corticospinal system is linked to dexterity in Peromyscus mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682851v1

⭐PhD position available!⭐ Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

Analysis of communication and collective behavior in animal groups

imprs-qbee.mpg.de

A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offer insights to transform urban planning and pest control

New York City’s Rats Have a Secret Nightlife—And a Language Humans Can’t Hear

A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offe...

scientificamerican.com

🌆🐀Scientific American article about the project we're starting on NYC rats!! scientificamerican.com/article/scie... w/ Emily Mackevicius, Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, @basisresearch.bsky.social Seeking collaborators and funders 🐀🌆

New York City’s Rats Have a Secret Nightlife—And a Language Humans Can’t Hear

A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offe...

scientificamerican.com

New paper on precise tool use learning in carrion crows @currentbiology.bsky.social. We show that—like New Caledonian crows—expert carrion crows pay close attention to the working end of their tool, suggesting tool integration into their peripersonal space. 🧵 & vids! 👇 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Can't wait to read this preprint from Misha Ahrens and team. Calcium imaging in larval zebrafish, in every cell in the body! Amazing. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What do neuroscience labs and the streets of New York City have in common? They are both commonly home to rats, a feature this research team is leveraging to study rat social cognition in the wild. By @martajhill.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/social-cogni...

The lab is growing! Our team is seeking talented scientists to study flexible sensory processing. We design freely-moving and head-fixed acoustic behaviors alongside acute and wireless neural recordings. PD and grad roles available Please help spread the word 🙏🧠🎵🐭 neurojobs.sfn.org/job/38911/po...

Postdoctoral Neuroscience Researcher - Storrs Mansfield, Connecticut job with Audette Lab, University of Connecticut | 38911

Fully funded postdoctoral research position studying context-dependent sensory processing in the mouse motor and auditory thalamus and cortex.

neurojobs.sfn.org

New preprint!

 tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵 w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Computational Urban Ecology of New York City Rats

Urban rats are highly adaptable, thriving in the dynamic and often inhospitable conditions of modern cities. Despite substantial mitigation efforts, they remain an enduring presence in urban environme...

biorxiv.org

Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro

Ziyi Gong@gongziyida.bsky.social · last yr.

I am happy to share our new preprint! In this work, we proposed a theory about how zebra finches bootstrap their error signals for self-guided RL via predictive coding 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature

Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

doi.org

In many brain areas, neuronal tuning is heterogeneous. But how does this diversity help behavior? We show how tuning diversity shapes representational geometry and boosts coding efficiency for perception in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (w/ @sueyeonchung.bsky.social&Tony Movshon)

Variations in neuronal selectivity create efficient representational geometries for perception

Our visual capabilities depend on neural response properties in visual areas of our brains. Neurons exhibit a wide variety of selective response properties, but the reasons for this diversity are unkn...

biorxiv.org

cheap speaker playback system for field experiments!

Nick Jourjine@nickjourjine.bsky.social · last yr.

A little behind-the-scenes story from our wild mouse study below tldr: We DIY'd a cheap ultrasonic speaker for an experiment. A rude polecat ruined the experiment. We hope the speaker might still be useful for others! Parts and protocol here: bit.ly/3TDl8ND #bioacoustics #neuroskyence 1/11

Very happy to share the latest from my postdoc‬! 10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data ➡️ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model 🐁 paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx #bioacoustics #neuroskyence 1/8

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum

David Hocker’s paper about compositional pretraining for RNNs that efficiently produces animal-like behaviors! Modeling cognitive tasks in RNNs requires thinking about latent abilities that animals bring to an experiment. Funded by NIH/CRCNS. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Compositional pretraining improves computational efficiency and matches animal behaviour on complex tasks - Nature Machine Intelligence

Hocker et al. demonstrate a method for training recurrent neural networks, which they call ‘kindergarten curriculum learning’, involving pretraining on simple cognitive tasks to improve learning effic...

nature.com

I’m a Dr now! (And new dad 😊). Thanks to all my mentors, colleagues, friends, and family past and present.

🦇👂🧠Our first bat paper is out! 🧠👂🦇 How do bats tell navigation from social calls? Led by the fearless Dr. Jenni Lawlor, we used 2P imaging to show that the auditory midbrain encodes categorical primitives. Check it out @natneuro.nature.com: rdcu.be/ehEgz

Spatially clustered neurons in the bat midbrain encode vocalization categories

Nature Neuroscience - Using two-photon imaging in awake bats, the authors show that the inferior colliculus encodes vocalization categories as categorical primitives—spatially clustered,...

rdcu.be

I highly recommend this inspiring new book by Nahum Ulanovsky! A plea for neuroscientists to embrace “Natural Neuroscience”: use emerging technologies to uncover meaningful behavior and neural representations in free-roaming animals exposed to real-world stimuli. mitpress.mit.edu/978026204499...

Natural Neuroscience

Natural neuroscience departs from the classical reductionist approach, which emphasizes control at the expense of natural behaviors, by proposing a shift tow...

mitpress.mit.edu

would love to embed some existing *ultrasonic* audio recordings into some pre-trained ANN feature space — anyone know of any *ultrasonic* networks out there? cc @animal-prattle.bsky.social @earthspecies.bsky.social @timsainburg.bsky.social @nicholdav.bsky.social @nickjourjine.bsky.social