How do brains plan actions towards goals?
To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵
Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
This project builds on work establishing the behaviour done at Champalimaud in Lisbon with @michaelfsp.bsky.social, Beatriz Godinho, Christian Machens, and @ruimcosta.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉)
📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
🧵 : 👇
Our work on how neural circuits in the cerebellum encode prior probabilities led by Julius Koppen is out now in Nature Neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Big thanks to Julius Koppen & the whole team! And dedicated to all of us who found inspiration in Bayesian theories of the brain!
Video
My undergraduate thesis, "Distinct patterns of social contagion under risk and ambiguity", is now published online at @commspsychol.nature.com
Deeply grateful for the guidance and constant support of Dr. Qingtian Mi, Prof. Jian Li, and Prof. Lusha Zhu.
Action selection using predictive models of the environment plays a fundamental role in human and animal behaviour, yet is poorly understood at circuit and algorithmic levels. Spatial navigation is an...
This study shows that cerebellar circuits learn and encode prior probabilities of event timing. Cell-type-specific neural activity reflects environmental statistics and guides predictive motor behavio...
🔔PREPRINT: Sleep ripples drive single-neuron reactivation for human memory consolidation
1/9: How does sleep support human memory consolidation? To test this, we recorded hundreds of neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) across learning, wakefulness, and sleep.
doi.org/10.64898/202...
Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers
valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance,
differences in temporal dynamics a...
New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.
Excited that my paper on metacontrol in humans and neural networks with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social and @lhuntneuro.bsky.social is out in PNAS! We examine the way that predictive representations of control enable behavioral adaptation across settings, and pathologies: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain — a Perspective by Lisa Feldman Barrett & Earl K. Miller
@lisafeldmanbarrett.com @earlkmiller.bsky.social
#neuroscience #neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
doi.org
Deng Pan
Online Now: Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions
The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...
www.annualreviews.org
Categorization, the grouping of objects, living organisms, actions or events into equivalence clusters, is fundamental to adaptive behaviour. In this Perspective, Barrett and Miller discuss evidence t...
Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics and information integration during percept formation often distinguish clinical from nonclinical populations. Computational psychiatry can elucidate these variations through two primary approaches: (i) Bayesian modeling, which treats perception as an unconscious inference, and (ii) an active, information-seeking perspective (e.g., reinforcement learning), which frames perceptual switches as internal actions. Our synthesis aims to leverage multistability to bridge these computational psychiatry subfields, linking human and animal studies as well as connecting behavior to underlying neural mechanisms. Perceptual multistability emerges as a promising noninvasive tool for clinical applications, facilitating translational research and enhancing our mechanistic understanding of cognitive processes and their impairments.
Coming up next week at the SoCR lab talk series is @alimahmoodi.bsky.social, who will be discussing his recent thought-provoking perspective, which advocates for a computational view of neural mechanisms of social cognition (contra an anatomical one).
Sepehr Razavi
Two experiments show that observing others shifts both risk and ambiguity preferences. Risk contagion is asymmetric, with stronger alignment toward risk-averse others, whereas ambiguity contagion is more symmetric.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
@dengpan.bsky.social
@qingtianmi.bsky.social
Two experiments with preregistered replications show that observing others shifts both risk and ambiguity preferences. Risk contagion is asymmetric, with stronger alignment toward risk-averse others, ...
