Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

“You can’t just be confident, you have to be confident about something.”

Research led by @jerlich and Xiaoyue Zhu in @nbdt_journal set out to disentangle the different kinds of confidence by designing a perceptual gambling task for rodents.

⬇️

sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog

Diagram of the perceptual gambling task. Rats need to report whether a tone is lower or higher than 8KHz. On some trials a flash on the right (or left) indicates that correct responses to the side of the flash will result in a higher reward. But errors are never rewarded. Credit - Jeff Erlich.
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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Alex Holcombe

Elsevier/RELX profit rises 10%, investor call: "continuing to see strong growth" including from pay-to-read and pay-to-publish. From the www.journalology.com newsletter.

In my opinion, more researchers and universities need to stop supporting them. One way to help is to join the Free Journal Network fediscience.org/@alexh/1140556

Elsevier parent company reports 10% rise in profit, to £3.2bn Relx, the parent company of academic publishing giant Elsevier, has reported a 10 per cent underlying growth in its adjusted operating profit for 2024, reaching just under £3.2 billion from revenues of £9.43bn. Within this, the scientific, technical and medical arm of the company—which includes its publishing business—had an adjusted operating profit of £1.17bn, with underlying growth of five per cent. This arm had revenue of £3.05bn, giving it an adjusted operating margin of 38.4 per cent, the company reported on 13 February. Research Professional News (Craig Nicholson)
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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Aki Vehtari

If you know simulation based calibration checking (SBC), you will enjoy our new paper "Posterior SBC: Simulation-Based Calibration Checking Conditional on Data" with Teemu Säilynoja, @marvinschmitt.com and @paulbuerkner.com
arxiv.org/abs/2502.03279 1/5

Title: Posterior SBC: Simulation-Based Calibration Checking Conditional on Data Authors: Teemu Säilynoja, Marvin Schmitt, Paul Bürkner, Aki Vehtari Abstract: Simulation-based calibration checking (SBC) refers to the validation of an inference algorithm and model implementation through repeated inference on data simulated from a generative model. In the original and commonly used approach, the generative model uses parameters drawn from the prior, and thus the approach is testing whether the inference works for simulated data generated with parameter values plausible under that prior. This approach is natural and desirable when we want to test whether the inference works for a wide range of datasets we might observe. However, after observing data, we are interested in answering whether the inference works conditional on that particular data. In this paper, we propose posterior SBC and demonstrate how it can be used to validate the inference conditionally on observed data. We illustrate the utility of posterior SBC in three case studies: (1) A simple multilevel model; (2) a model that is governed by differential equations; and (3) a joint integrative neuroscience model which is approximated via amortized Bayesian inference with neural networks.
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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

New SWC research identifies the precise brain mechanisms that enable animals to overcome instinctive fears.

Full story ➡️ sainsburywellcome.org/web/rese

Read the full paper in Science from Sara Mederos, Patty Blakely, @NicoleVissers Claudia Clopath and Sonja Hofer. ➡️ science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc

Coronal brain slice showing projections from different visual areas in the cerebral cortex to the ventrolateral geniculate nucleus (vLGN). These pathways are part of the circuit identified as mediating the suppression of instinctive fear responses.
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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Redish Lab

@pluralistic

How does that "individual pricing in grocery stores" work? Does that mean the price can change from the time you take it off the shelf to the time you check out? How does that match the "economic agreement"? (which depends on full information on both sides).

At least airplane and online store prices lock in the individual price when you select it. It doesn't suddenly change at the payment page. Although, I'm sure that's the next enshitification step...

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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Earl K. Miller

A hardy and hale "huzzah!" to Emery N. Brown on receiving the National Medal of Science! It’s the nation’s highest honor for scientists and engineers.
picower.mit.edu/news/emery-n-b
#neuroscience

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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
desrocherslab

New findings: We track visual sequences yet the brain's process is unclear. We discovered the sequence-tracking area in monkey's lateral prefrontal cortex is distinct from an adjacent subregion that reacts to other stimulus changes. #neuroscience 🧠 🧪 👩‍🔬
buff.ly/4fC3pzB

Different Subregions of Monkey Lateral Prefrontal Cortex Respond to Abstract Sequences and Their Components

Sequential information permeates daily activities, such as when watching for the correct series of buildings to determine when to get off the bus or train. These sequences include periodicity (the spacing of the buildings), the identity of the stimuli (the kind of house), and higher-order more abstract rules that may not depend on the exact stimulus (e.g., house, house, house, business). Previously, we found that the posterior fundus of area 46 in the monkey lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) responds to rule changes in such abstract visual sequences. However, it is unknown if this region responds to other components of the sequence, i.e., image periodicity and identity, in isolation. Further, it is unknown if this region dissociates from other, more ventral LPFC subregions that have been associated with sequences and their components. To address these questions, we used awake functional magnetic resonance imaging in three male macaque monkeys during two no-report visual tasks. One task contained abstract visual sequences, and the other contained no visual sequences but maintained the same image periodicity and identities. We found the fundus of area 46 responded only to abstract sequence rule violations. In contrast, the ventral bank of area 46 responded to changes in image periodicity and identity, but not changes in the abstract sequence. These results suggest a functional specialization within anatomical substructures of LPFC to signal different kinds of stimulus regularities. This specialization may provide key scaffolding to identify abstract patterns and construct complex models of the world for daily living.

Journal of Neuroscience
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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
eLife

A computational #NeuralNetwork model leverages a simple unsupervised learning principle to account for recent findings on when memories move apart (differentiate) or together (integrate) in the brain. #Neuroscience elifesciences.org/articles/886

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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Earl K. Miller

Faces will melt. #sfn2024 #SfN24
reggieslive.com/show/pavlovs-d

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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
jonny (good kind)

It took me ~a year to translate Neurodata Without Borders to linkml+pydantic with full abstraction over array/storage backend. Now that I did that, it is taking me ~hours to make interfaces to put NWB in SQL dbs, web APIs for editing and serving NWB datasets (where you can download arbitrary slices of the individual datasets instead of a bigass 100GB HDF5 file), and interconversion between hdf5, dask, and zarr.

Anyway open data in neuroscience is about to get real good.

#neuroscience #linkml #OpenData #OpenScience

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Jeffrey C. Erlich

Come visit out poster Tuesday Oct 8 Morning!

LBA008.033 / LBA119 -
Task Context Shapes Short-Term Memory Localisation

Go see our very exciting results demonstrating the sensitivity of working memory strategies to task context. We made two variations of a classic 2AFC memory-guided orienting task : one that encouraged an egocentric strategy and one that encouraged an allocentric strategy. The results shocked us! M2 only involved in egocentric planning!

abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/204

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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Applications now open! Join the SWC PhD Programme 2025

🧠 World-class training in systems neuroscience
💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme
💂 Based in London with close links to @GatsbyUCL

Learn more and apply by 11 Nov: sainsburywellcome.org/web/cont

#PhD #Neuroscience

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Jeffrey C. Erlich

Excited to share a new paper from the lab:

Encoding of 2D Self-Centered Plans and World-Centered Positions in the Rat Frontal Orienting Field

Activity in the M2 predicts upcoming choices. But what does the activity represent? A gaze-centered plan? A world-centered goal? A specific movement? We asked rats to plan responses to different targets from different start position to find out!

Liujunli Li, Timo Flesch, Ce Ma, Jingjie Li, Yizhou Chen, Hung-Tu Chen and Jeffrey C. Erlich
Journal of Neuroscience 11 September 2024, 44 (37) e0018242024; doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0018

Tweetthread: x.com/erlichlab/status/1835716

Encoding of 2D Self-Centered Plans and World-Centered Positions in the Rat Frontal Orienting Field

The neural mechanisms of motor planning have been extensively studied in rodents. Preparatory activity in the frontal cortex predicts upcoming choice, but limitations of typical tasks have made it challenging to determine whether the spatial information is in a self-centered direction reference frame or a world-centered position reference frame. Here, we trained male rats to make delayed visually guided orienting movements to six different directions, with four different target positions for each direction, which allowed us to disentangle direction versus position tuning in neural activity. We recorded single unit activity from the rat frontal orienting field (FOF) in the secondary motor cortex, a region involved in planning orienting movements. Population analyses revealed that the FOF encodes two separate 2D maps of space. First, a 2D map of the planned and ongoing movement in a self-centered direction reference frame. Second, a 2D map of the animal’s current position on the port wall in a world-centered reference frame. Thus, preparatory activity in the FOF represents self-centered upcoming movement directions, but FOF neurons multiplex both self- and world-reference frame variables at the level of single neurons. Neural network model comparison supports the view that despite the presence of world-centered representations, the FOF receives the target information as self-centered input and generates self-centered planning signals.

doi.org
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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Marieke van Vugt

“We need to understand interorgan communication if we want to understand the aging process,”science.org/content/article/fa

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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Marieke van Vugt

Sounds familiar to me: teh challenge of being an interdisciplinary academic science.org/content/article/wh

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Jeffrey C. Erlich

This seems important. A new catalytic process converts CO2 to ethanol or acetic acid. phys.org/news/2024-05-catalyst

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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

How do neural circuits generate flexible, cognitive behaviours? The Duan and @jerlich labs are looking for 2️⃣ excellent postdoctoral research fellows to join the team. Check out the vacancies and apply by 25 May: sainsburywellcome.org/web/cont

Four mice sitting around a poker table in a cave, dealing in playing cards and cheeses. On the wall is an image of a human brain.
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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
Andrew MacAskill

!! come join us as a group leader !! we have 2 lectureships just opened for applications in our department at UCL! Join one of the best, the most exciting and most friendly neuroscience departments! ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/search-u #neuroscience #jobs #london

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Jeffrey C. Erlich

A-mazing.

"A robot-rodent interaction arena with adjustable spatial complexity for ethologically relevant behavioral studies"

cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext

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Jeffrey C. Erlich boosted
jonny (good kind)

Someone got mad at me for using CC-BY-NC because it was a "nonfree license." Not like it stops them in practice, but now that all CC-BY are being harvested for LLMs i think I was right.

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