🚨🚨New Preprint Alert!🚨🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Animal learning is painfully slow (at least initially). Yet, well trained animals can learn very fast, sometimes displaying few-shot inference. How does this transition occur?

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Our paper on foraging is now published in Neuron! Read it here: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... This project was co-led by Michael Bukwich (not on Bluesky) and me, with major contributions from all co-authors. Huge thanks to the whole team!

This year's Kyoto Prize in Adavanced Technology goes to Dr. Shun-ichi Amari! www.kyotoprize.org/en/laureates...

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team. publicusaresearchbenefits.com please share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!

New in the Deeper Learning blog: The Kempner’s Demba Ba explains his team’s recent Neuron paper on DUNL, a deep learning framework that tames the complexity of brain data. bit.ly/KempnerDUNL #AI #neuroscience #neuroskyence #ML

MCB’s Daniel Cardozo Pinto and Wendy Valencia Montoya Named 2025 Harvard Junior Fellows www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @dcardozopinto.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @dulaclab.bsky.social @harvardoeb.bsky.social

Our new paper. Prospective contingency explains behavior and dopamine signals during associative learning. Collaboration with @neurovenki.bsky.social , @gershbrain.bsky.social rdcu.be/ed1na

Decoding Learning: How Cues and Rewards Shape Behavior and Dopamine Signals 🧠 🧪🧫 🧬 #science #neuro www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @saramatias.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social @natureneuro.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social

How can we design human-interpretable AI models to explain why neurons behave as they do? Excited to share our work in collaboration with @saramatias.bsky.social, Hao Wu, Simona Temereanca, @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social, @neurovenki.bsky.social, @paulmasset.bsky.social, and Demba Ba @harvard.edu 1/21

Happy to be a part of it! Congratultations, Bahareh Tolooshams, Sara Matias, and the team! Thanks, Demba Ba and Paul Masset, for their leadership! "Interpretable deep learning for deconvolutional analysis of neural signals" authors.elsevier.com/c/1klDA3BtfH...

New Deep Learning Framework Reveals Hidden Structure in Neural Activity 🧠 #neuro #science www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @saramatias.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @btolooshams.bsky.social @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social

Our new study: Dopamine in the tail of the striatum facilitates avoidance in threat–reward conflicts. Congrats Iku-Tsutsui Kimura, Melissa Tian and others! Led by Mitsuko Watabe-Uchida. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Turing Award Goes to 2 Pioneers of Artificial Intelligence www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/t...

In our new paper @dulaclab.bsky.social, we investigated a fundamental question in social neuroscience: the origin of "sociality" (the need of being together) at the levels of behavior, neuron type, neural circuit and sensory modulation. (Detailed digest below) (1/7) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper @dulaclab.bsky.social on social homeostasis is online today! We characterized “social rebound” behavior after social isolation in multiple mouse strains and revealed its neural basis. Intriguingly, soft touch plays a key role in satisfying social need! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dulac Lab Identifies “Loneliness” Neurons in the Hypothalamus 🧠🧪🤖💡 #Science #Neuron www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @dingliu.bsky.social @blogeman.bsky.social @dulaclab.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social

Our latest findings on social behavior circuits is out: how does the brain responds to social isolation? Terrific work by @dingliu.bsky.social et al. uncovering a circuit with similar neural architecture as physiological needs (hunger, thirst, sleep..). Detailed thread soon. rdcu.be/ebo63

Stand up for Science, on March 7th, in Boston. Please help spread this widely.

Here it is finally: Our mathematical methods book for life scientists! Aimed at advanced undergrads and beginning grad students, plus all those who want a deeper look at the math behind quantitative biology. @portugueslab.bsky.social. 1/3

Our new paper on distributional reinforcement learning.

Excited that Adam Lowet's PhD work has been just been published in @nature.com at doi.org/10.1038/s415.... He has already posted about it on Twitter/X (see twitter.com/Adam_Lowet/s...), but let me re-post his thread here. 1/9

Interested in understanding how things work? In particular the tools you use to study the brain? Join us at TENSS 2025 where we brainstorm ideas, build and debug microscopes, electrophysiology and behavior rigs amidst the picturesque Transylvanian hills! tenss.ro Apply by: February 16th!

Nice to see this paper out from Jack Lindsey and his collaborators: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... They diagnose a fundamental problem with existing models of striatal plasticity, show how to fix it, and then reanalyze data from recordings of striatal projection neurons to support the model.

this is the travel grant that changed my life and career!!! i applied as a sophomore in college and it’s what introduced me to the field of computational neuroscience 😍 i highly recommend you share with your undergrads / apply yourself if you are one! happy to answer any questions about it