A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offer insights to transform urban planning and pest control

🌆🐀Scientific American article about the project we're starting on NYC rats!! scientificamerican.com/article/scie... w/ Emily Mackevicius, Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, @basisresearch.bsky.social Seeking collaborators and funders 🐀🌆

New paper on precise tool use learning in carrion crows @currentbiology.bsky.social. We show that—like New Caledonian crows—expert carrion crows pay close attention to the working end of their tool, suggesting tool integration into their peripersonal space. 🧵 & vids! 👇 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Can't wait to read this preprint from Misha Ahrens and team. Calcium imaging in larval zebrafish, in every cell in the body! Amazing. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What do neuroscience labs and the streets of New York City have in common? They are both commonly home to rats, a feature this research team is leveraging to study rat social cognition in the wild. By @martajhill.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/social-cogni...

The lab is growing! Our team is seeking talented scientists to study flexible sensory processing. We design freely-moving and head-fixed acoustic behaviors alongside acute and wireless neural recordings. PD and grad roles available Please help spread the word 🙏🧠🎵🐭 neurojobs.sfn.org/job/38911/po...

New preprint!

 tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵 w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

In many brain areas, neuronal tuning is heterogeneous. But how does this diversity help behavior? We show how tuning diversity shapes representational geometry and boosts coding efficiency for perception in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (w/ @sueyeonchung.bsky.social&Tony Movshon)

cheap speaker playback system for field experiments!

Very happy to share the latest from my postdoc‬! 10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data ➡️ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model 🐁 paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx #bioacoustics #neuroskyence 1/8

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum

David Hocker’s paper about compositional pretraining for RNNs that efficiently produces animal-like behaviors! Modeling cognitive tasks in RNNs requires thinking about latent abilities that animals bring to an experiment. Funded by NIH/CRCNS. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

I’m a Dr now! (And new dad 😊). Thanks to all my mentors, colleagues, friends, and family past and present.

🦇👂🧠Our first bat paper is out! 🧠👂🦇 How do bats tell navigation from social calls? Led by the fearless Dr. Jenni Lawlor, we used 2P imaging to show that the auditory midbrain encodes categorical primitives. Check it out @natneuro.nature.com: rdcu.be/ehEgz

I highly recommend this inspiring new book by Nahum Ulanovsky! A plea for neuroscientists to embrace “Natural Neuroscience”: use emerging technologies to uncover meaningful behavior and neural representations in free-roaming animals exposed to real-world stimuli. mitpress.mit.edu/978026204499...

would love to embed some existing *ultrasonic* audio recordings into some pre-trained ANN feature space — anyone know of any *ultrasonic* networks out there? cc @animal-prattle.bsky.social @earthspecies.bsky.social @timsainburg.bsky.social @nicholdav.bsky.social @nickjourjine.bsky.social

Our first look at midbrain PAG’s role in singing mouse vocal control. When near each other, these mice produce two divergent vocal modes. Same circuits for USVs and Songs—or different ones? Bets were made..some of us bought beers for others! Led by @xmikezheng20.bsky.social & Clifford Harpole. 👇🏽

Excited to share my latest work just out in @pnas.org! This NIH MOSAIC K99-funded project identifies a top-down cortical circuit—from cingulate to auditory cortex—that supports auditory perceptual performance in challenging listening conditions: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Finally, a stochastic parrot I care about Mike Long's group shows a topological mapping in budgie brain area that projects to vocal motorneurons, similar to what we see in analogous area of human speech motor cortex, unlike what we see in the same area in zebra finches #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics

Everything sucks. Let’s carve out a little space for something that doesn’t. Music League is an app for making collaborative themed playlists. Looking forward to hearing the music that inspires you in times of rage, anxiety, and heartbreak. app.musicleague.com/l/8093706cca... Please RT

Neurosift v2 has been released, check it out! neurosift.app @dandiarchive.org @nwb.org @openneuro.bsky.social #openscience #opensource #neurophysiology

Thanks to NIH funding that allowed us to appreciate this relationship. www.cnn.com/2025/01/03/h...

Big paper from @paigel.bsky.social in our lab: Sensory feedback is always crucial for proper development, right? Wrong! Crazier still, the motor system is the slowest part of a developing reflex circuit! Surprises abound in this bluetorial c’mon along…. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/19

Ty for the shoutout @animal-prattle.bsky.social! Had a great time getting feedback on this work at #NeurIPS2024

Thanks @elife.bsky.social for featuring our work with an eLife digest! elifesciences.org/digests/8989...

Happy holidays, happy new year, happy to reintroduce our gerbil vocal dialect paper! Final version now available in eLife elifesciences.org/articles/89892

In case you haven't seen it yet, movement is one of the most interesting and well engineered toolkits working with pose tracking data like from sleap.ai! Strong recommend 🤙

I was very honoured to have been invited to speak at the 2025 GRC conference in Neuroethology. Join us from June 29 - July 4 in Italy!! www.grc.org/neuroetholog...

“Neuroscience has never been better positioned to make transformative discoveries about how intelligence emerges from neural circuits … But to truly harness them, we need a new research model that can drive systematic breakthroughs,” argues @davidamarkowitz.bsky.social bit.ly/3ZO2hUa #neuroskyence

Excited to share our #NeurIPS2024 paper on deep learning models and benchmark datasets for localizing + attributing vocalizations in social interactions! Please come visit the poster on Friday 11am-1pm PST in West Ballroom A-D #5406. Paper link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hi 🔵☁️! My name is Ralph - I am working on my PhD in neuroscience at NYU where I research auditory processing and vocal communication. I’m generally interested in how the brain controls behavior, perception, and understanding neural function in natural contexts (e.g. social interactions, in the wild)

Are you in the midst of neuroscience PhD program applications? Want an extra pair of eyes on your application? If you’re applying to NYU, students have organized a program to review your app with you before you submit and give general advice! forms.gle/JdeQb2tTmeLo...