Ben Kanter @beneuroscience@qoto.org

Hi all ​
Our latest #Review on #SplitterCells is now published in @eLife !!
I will probably write a real thread on it when I get a chance... for now:

link: https://elifesciences.org/articles/82357

why: some neurons in the #Hippocampus (and other brain regions) of #Rats (and other mammals) have the fascinating ability to discriminate not just different presents, but different past or future states or trajectories in the same current situation. They could be related to #EpisodicMemory or #DecisionMaking ​They are called 'trajectory-dependent cells' or Splitter Cells. ​ We tried to make sense of them!

what: Hippocampal Splitter cells do a lot of puzzling stuff. For example there's a lot of them even in tasks that do not require the Hippocampus to be solved. They spread asymmetrically on a linear track leading to a choice point - 'past' splitters around the start and 'future' splitters towards the choice point. #TimeCells cells can be splitter cells (but they're usually #PlaceCells). Splitter cells evolve with experience, or maybe it is performance, nobody really knows. ​​ ... and a lot more weird stuff

conclusion: Two different computational models, the temporal context model and the latent state model, each explain a subset of the properties of splitter cells... so perhaps the Hippocampus implements both! But more experiments are needed to disentangle them ​

now what: questions or comments? Please let us know!! ​

#Neuroscience #Cognition #NeuroPaper

@dlevenstein @tyrell_turing @NicoleCRust @cogneurophys @charanranganath @PessoaBrain
@dbarack

This is a little different, but Paul Glimcher's book (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262572279/decisions-uncertainty-and-the-brain/) spends a lot of time going through the history of the Sherringtonian view and how it has led us astray. In a nutshell, the Sherringtonian (which is basically a Cartesian or Pavolovian view) is that action is a reflex in response to sensory input. Paul draws on game theory (in particular the work of John Maynard-Smith) to argue that competing animals cannot be "reflexive" because we need to be unpredictable. I don't recall if he directly connects this unpredictability with attractor dynamics

#neuroscience

Slowly figuring out how predictive coding happens in the brain ...

A beautiful piece by @ViolaPriesemann and her team.

Out now in TINS

https://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/fulltext/S0166-2236(22)00186-2

Geometric constraints on human brain function
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.04.510897v1
---
RT @DrBreaky
@AFornito presenting great work with @jchrispang & @Kevin_M_Aquino on brain eigenmodes at #brainmodes2022

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.04.510897v1
https://twitter.com/DrBreaky/status/1594695990908702720

Honestly pretty fascinated by the gloomy person with two mouths. Is this what science is?

"What is behavior? No seriously, what is it?"

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.04.451053v1.full.pdf

Something deeply unsettling is growing in the top left picture

"One-to-one mapping between deep network units and real neurons uncovers a visual population code for social behavior"

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.18.500505.full.pdf

#Introduction
I'm a professional editor with @NatureEcoEvo. I spend my days reading a huge variety of ecology manuscripts and helping papers through the review process.

I lurk on sites like this one (and Twitter for now) to stay aware of what ecologists are excited about. I also share exciting recent papers and editorial rants/wisdom from time to time.

Before becoming an editor, my research background was in disease ecology and animal behavior.

I don’t see them here, so check out this amazing project! h/t @Neurograce

New paper: preclinical proof of concept of retinal functional ultrasound for assessing neurovascular coupling alterations non-invasively.
Such alterations could be early markers of neurodegenerative diseases.
Ultrasound does not go through the skull so easily so we use the retina as a functional window to the brain.

We demonstrate this on rat models of Alzheimer's disease.

https://psyarxiv.com/2uxwk/
This paper is so awesome it is prompting me to write my first toot.
The science, the writing, the conclusion about scientific writing. I laughed out loud multiple times reading it. Hats off!

Hmm. I am usually the last to join a new technology/trend (refused cell phones for years, didn't want to upgrade from windows 3.11 to 95 and kept Keynote9 for way too long). So moving to mastodon so early makes me nervous.

Consider this my @introduction. I am tentatively here :).

Computational neuroscientist by training (RL FTW), now comp psychiatry & psychotherapy (human behavior & individual diff FTW), and on sabbatical learning & practicing CBT! Lab @ Princeton full of wonderful people.

BIG DATA RELEASE We are beyond excited to announce the release of our Brain Wide Map of neural activity during decision making! It consists of 547 Neuropixel recordings of 32784 neurons across 194 regions of the mouse brain

All these recordings were performed in a distributed fashion in 12 different labs, spanning Europe and the US Rigorous standardization of methods and materials allowed us to pool the data from these labs together into a single gigantic dataset

Mice are performing our standardized perceptual decision-making task in which they have to position a stimulus in the center of a screen to receive reward. The dataset contains the stimuli and decisions, but also videos from three angles and DeepLabCut pose information. We're even releasing all the raw ephys data!

We know, it's a lot. At your own pace you can read all the details about the experimental setup, the task, processing of the data, and much more in the technical paper which accompanies this data release: https://figshare.com/articles/preprint/Data_release_-_Brainwide_map_-_Q4_2022/21400815

To explore the data at your leisure, visit our visualization website where you can scroll through different recording sessions, look at neural activity during example trials, and see trial-based activity of single neurons: https://viz.internationalbrainlab.org

Do you have itchy fingers to run your models on this humongous dataset? We totally get it! Here you can find how to download the data using our API so you can fire up those computing clusters: https://int-brain-lab.github.io/iblenv/notebooks_external/data_release_brainwidemap.html

This was a collective effort of our stellar team, who all put in so much work to make this monumental achievement possible. Our collaboration consists of 22 PIs, 37 researchers, and 11 staff members who all worked tirelessly to bring these data to you, the community

Greetings fediverse!

Time for my official #introduction.

I'm a #PhD researcher in Cognitive #Neuroscience based in Leipzig (Germany) where I work with @martin_hebart and many more wonderful scientists.

I'm primarily interested in how the brain builds representations of every-day objects in a way that supports our experience and behavior. And I get to use some seriously cool large-scale #fMRI data to do so! (check out the preprint here: https://tinyurl.com/4c28uny6).

Great to meet all of you!

There's a bit of a storm happening around the criteria for joining http://fediscience.org - the Mastodon instance for scientists, on which I'm hosted.

It's been noted that the requirement to be a publishing scientist (who has published in the past 5 years) will exclude many junior scientists, retired sciences, and those who have maybe switched to teaching.

I agree with these concerns and wonder if the criteria can be changed to be more inclusive?

Cc https://fediscience.org/@FrankSonntag

The most detailed map ever made of the communication links between the hippocampus and the rest of the brain has been created by Australian scientists. And it may change how we think about human memory. https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/most-in-depth-map-of-the-hippcampus-raises-connection-questions-367546

#neuro #neuroscience #brain #science #memory #learning #research #health #medicine #mentalhealth #psychiatry #psychology #cogpsych

Time for an #introduction! I'm a research scientist at MIT and I run http://lookit.mit.edu, a platform for remote infant & child development studies.

I'm generally interested in open science, big collaborations, and building tools for reproducible science & data management. I love being curious about how & why we work the way we do!

My research background is in language acquisition and cognitive development (event semantics! transitive verbs!)

Some projects:

Hello, #Mastodon! Greetings from my hospital bed.

This image depicts blood vessels in a pigeon’s head. It was captured by the veterinarian Scott Echols as part of an ongoing endeavour known as the Grey Parrot Anatomy Project, which aims to develop ways to aid diagnosis and treatment for a host of animals, from birds to humans. By understanding what is normal, doctors and scientists are better positioned to identify and ultimately treat the abnormal. #sciart #ScienceMastodon #medicalhistory