Beyond proud of @atal-pande.bsky.social, whose first PhD chapter is out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Atal shows that spiders that use their vision to hunt have convergently evolved similar eye arrangements, which imply lots of resampling of frontal space www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hunting ecology predicts eye arrangements in the modular visual system of spiders

Vision is one of the most important senses used by animals and contributes to fundamental behaviors, including foraging, navigation, and mate detectio…

sciencedirect.com

First preprint from the lab! Using intracellular recordings & analysis of 2-photon imaging data, we show that spiking & neuromodulatory input during experience drive a reorganization of visuomotor inputs in V1 layer 2/3 neurons, consistent with enhanced visuomotor cancellation - bioRxiv link below.

Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social! A dive into the deep history of vertebrate vision, together with @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social Photo credit : Vasilis Karkalas

George Kafetzis@gkafetzis.bsky.social · 11mo ago

👁️The retina — strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians! So how did it evolve? With @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social, we argue that retinal complexity may 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n

Hi everyone, we would like to invite you to follow @noblackboxes.bsky.social and share with anyone who believes that explaining and understanding technology is essential for scientists. You can also donate to support the No Black Boxes foundation.

Donate to In Memory of Adam: His Legacy of Education for Everyone, organized by Elena Dreosti

Adam’s greatest loves were his ideas, his work, and our two chil… Elena Dreosti needs your support for In Memory of Adam: His Legacy of Education for Everyone

gofundme.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

Cool work by Lu! Dissociating "context frames" from categorical/perceptual similarity and finding unique "context" signatures in LOC/PPA.

Lu-Chun Yeh@luchunyeh.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Spatiotemporal representations of contextual associations for real-world objects. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Excited to share our new work on visual information processing in the retinocollicular pathway. We discovered that while luminance responses can predict motion responses in retinal ganglion cells, this prediction does not hold in the superior colliculus cells. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Decoupling of visual feature selectivity in the retinocollicular pathway

Schwartz and Matsumoto et al. show that visual feature selectivity for luminance and motion is coupled in the retina but becomes decoupled in the superior colliculus. This transformation reorganizes t...

cell.com

🚨 New paper out by Granados-Martínez et al. "Poison #frogs rely on vision for #homing in natural environments" 🐸👀🌳 @royalsocietypublishing.org Check it out: ↘️ doi.org/10.1098/rspb... ↙️ #Navigation #Dendrobatidae #SpatialEcology

In social animals, the choose of foraging sites can be biased by social cues of conspecifics. This preprint shows that the presence of hornets on food sources attracts conspecifics or other closely related hornets. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Social attraction mediates collective foraging decisions in invasive hornets

Group-living animals commonly use social information to better locate and exploit resources. In many insects, birds, fish and mammals, this can lead to collective foraging decisions by which animals s...

biorxiv.org

The inflammatory reflex shows how the brain regulates immunity through the vagus nerve: signals reach the spleen, activate T cells, and release acetylcholine to reduce TNF-α. Inflammation isn’t only chemical, it’s electrical, with the brain telling the immune system when to calm down (James Durham)

Our latest paper is out! While the circadian photoentrainment circuit has been extensively studied, the mechanisms regulating its development remain poorly understood. Here we show that retinal Müller glia play a key role in this process. Check it out! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Retinal glia regulate development of the circadian photoentrainment circuit

Circadian photoentrainment depends on intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), which convey environmental light information to th…

sciencedirect.com

(1/n) We are excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications, by Hagar Lavian (@hlavian.bsky.social) and team, revealing how the zebrafish brain integrates visual navigation signals! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Visual motion and landmark position align with heading direction in the zebrafish interpeduncular nucleus - Nature Communications

How are various visual signals integrated in the vertebrate brain for navigation? Here authors show that different spatial signals are topographically organized and align to one another in the zebrafi...

nature.com

Our paper showing the first ever recordings of spiking activity from neurons in the human lateral geniculate nucleus has just been published in Nature Communications! Congrats to the whole team. #neuroskyence @nin-knaw.bsky.social @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Effects of eye closure on the spiking activity of human lateral geniculate neurons - Nature Communications

The LGN is a critical stage between the retina and visual cortex, but the properties of human LGN neurons are not fully understood. Here the authors report that they closely resemble those in monkeys ...

nature.com

The magentic sense is undoubtedly one of the greatest secrets in sensory biology. Whole brain activity mapping in response to 🧲 stimulation revealed a light-independent activity in the medial vestibular nuclei & the caudal mesopallium in the pigeon 🧠 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A global screen for magnetically induced neuronal activity in the pigeon brain

How animals detect the Earth’s magnetic field remains a mystery in sensory biology. Despite extensive behavioral evidence, the neural circuitry and molecular mechanisms responsible for magnetic sensin...

science.org

🚨New Preprint! How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715 + @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social 🧵 1/14

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex

Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified ...

arxiv.org

Excellent work @victorcalbiagueg.bsky.social !!!

The Journal of Physiology@jphysiol.bsky.social · 10mo 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/...

Proud to have contributed to @gaiabianchini.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social new paper on how the superior colliculus temporally integrates multisensory information

Functional specialisation of multisensory temporal integration in the mouse superior colliculus - Nature Communications

Whether and how anatomically distinct regions of the superior colliculus (SC) exhibit specialisation in multisensory temporal integration to facilitate different behavioural responses are not fully un...

nature.com

a must read for anyone interested visual cortex plasticity - a fresh look at some textbook models and a fun read. congratulations to the authors!

David@dav1dcg.bsky.social · 11mo ago

A Critical Look at Critical Periods Great review of the critical period in the visual cortex. Nice evolutionary perspective, covering the key papers and mechanisms, and proposing a continuous process of plasticity that already starts before eye opening. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Macaque IT neurons may shift from low to high spatial frequencies over time, supporting a coarse-to-fine view of vision. Evidence is incomplete, but the study offers clues to how spatial frequency links to category signals in object recognition. buff.ly/Lv3CQmq

Why do optical illusions work? The culprit may be a group of neurons in the visual cortex that help us fill in missing information. @markjohnpost.bsky.social for @washingtonpost.com dives into the science and how it could help demystify visual hallucinations: www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

The origins of hallucinations are traced in specialized brain cells

Researchers used lasers to record and stimulate the activity of neurons in mice to learn how the brain processes and interprets optical illusions.

washingtonpost.com

The 2025 volume of the Annual Review of Vision Science is now online. The most read article so far is "Behavior-Specific Computations in the Vertebrate Retina" arevie.ws/46HMEjd @serenariccitelli.bsky.social @annaintegrated.bsky.social @katrinfranke.bsky.social TOC: arevie.ws/3Wklava

Some animals are able to use objects in their environment as tools, like 🐒, 🦜 and corvids. In this new report from the Nieder lab, they show that carrions crows, with no tool-use adaptations are able to use a stick as a tool and refine their precision through learning! 🐦‍⬛ www.cell.com/current-biol...

Learned precision tool use in carrion crows

Moll et al. show that carrion crows—which do not habitually use tools in the wild—can be trained to use a stick tool as an extension of their body. Trained crows flexibly adjust tool orientation and d...

cell.com

👁️The retina — strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians! So how did it evolve? With @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social, we argue that retinal complexity may 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n

a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out .

ALT: a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out .

media.tenor.com

Our EMBL Press office has a nice little article on our recent paper on how the pupil's dynamics shape visual responses in the mouse and human. A new look at the pupil: more than just a gatekeeper www.embl.org/news/science...

A new look at the pupil: more than just a gatekeeper | EMBL

New research from the Rompani and Asari groups at EMBL Rome suggests that the pupil does more than just respond to light and internal states — it may actively shape our vision.

embl.org

Seeing the world through the lens of oscillations - we are delighted to share our new paper where we demonstrate that anatomically resolved oscillatory bursts reveal dynamic motifs of thalamocortical activity during naturalistic stimulus viewing (doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...).

Excellent end to the Italian Congress for Neuroscience (SINS) - our postdoc Lucia Zanetti chairing a fascinating session on the retina & beyond together with @serenariccitelli.bsky.social! Well done & thanks to the speakers Stefano Di Marco, @santiagorompani.bsky.social, Norma Kühn & Max Joesch

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today! A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41... Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

nature.com

How do animals decide if they should forage for food or stay home to take care of newborn offspring? Whose needs come first? For my PhD work now out in Nature, we examined how hunger and parenting neurons interact and are reshaped postpartum in mice 🧵⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A hypothalamic circuit that modulates feeding and parenting behaviours - Nature

Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of mouse hypothalamus and behavioural experiments show that specific hypothalamic networks regulate conflicting feeding versus parenting behaviours of female mice.

nature.com

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Barcoded Rabies In Situ Connectomics for high-throughput reconstruction of neural circuits

Sequencing of oligonucleotide barcodes holds promise as a high-throughput approach for reconstructing synaptic connectivity at scale. Rabies viruses can act as a vehicle for barcode transmission, than...

biorxiv.org

Our paper on NHP neuropixels is finally out in Nat Neuro! These probes have already been transformative and will usher in a new era of primate neuroscience. I am extremely proud to have played a very small role in this project. I can't wait to see what our community discovers. tinyurl.com/54u3hrj8

Large-scale high-density brain-wide neural recording in nonhuman primates - Nature Neuroscience

Neuropixels 1.0 NHP is a 45-mm, high-density silicon probe capable of recording large numbers of neurons with single-neuron resolution from most areas in a macaque’s brain.

tinyurl.com