🔥Excited to be starting as a Lecturer (Assistant Prof.) at Queen Mary Univ. of London QMUL Psychology QM_SBBS Queen Mary University of London! 🔥 My lab will focus on computational cognitive neurosci. 🧠 of decision-making under uncertainty 🎲, e.g., during navigation 🧭, using machine learning & robotics 🤖

In 2020, we published a paper in which we trained stochastic stabilised supralinear networks. It was agony: after several years of work, we managed to train a total of 15 parameters for a network of 100 neurons. Now Wayne Soo figured out how to train all 10000 weights.

What does golf and the prefrontal cortex have in common? Find out from Jake's post. PS. If you are more into astronomy than golf then: What does the Mariner-10 space probe, and the PFC have in common? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_10 (hint: think of gravitational slingshot).

Indeed, this was fun to write, many thanks to co-authors James Heald, Daniel Wolpert. As a theorist, I have always been daunted by the many, idiosyncratic ways different communities have conceptualized (context-dependent) learning. Here is our humble attempt to unify some of this.

What in the pic below helps navigation? A map, sure. And a compass, of course. A blue dot that shows where you are. Noticed that blue disc around the dot? That's a representation of uncertainty. Yul HR Kang (강형률) explored what this means for human navigation and rodent grid cells.

Models of single-neuron processing describe a neuron's functional architecture as either tree-like, following the real morphology of dendrites, or one big densely connected DNN. Young Joon Kim found that it's neither: there are two sparse "trees" in parallel. Paper in Cell Reports.

Standard approaches to neural coding only consider the rate of spike trains to be controlled by stimuli. How do we model stimulus-controlled spike train variability? Paper by @davindi09 at #NeurIPS2023 has the answer: tiny.cc/npnr. Poster is out today (Session 5).

A paper that changed the way I think about stuff I thought I understood (pattern completion, in particular) - and I even got to be an author on it: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…. Check out post by Jake Stroud for a gentle introduction.

Sub-additivity (aka. response normalization) and variability quenching often go hand-in-hand in cortex. Why? We provide some potential answers: rdcu.be/dy1q5 -- a review with Goris Lab CoenCagli_Lab Ken Miller and Nick Priebe.

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There was too much to compress into the intro /discussion of Jake Stroud's paper on dynamic coding (pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…) so we ended up writing a review: cell.com/trends/cogniti…

When you start a debate with Jonathan Pillow only to realise that you actually agree on almost everything. Long live Marr's levels -- all of them.

I am looking forward to this workshop! TLDR; IMHO it's a bug, but our brain still makes the most of it.

Thanks, Rodrigo Echeveste for stopping by and telling us about your exciting and diverse research -- in spite of the deteriorating conditions for research in Argentina (science.org/content/articl…).