How does our visual system process natural scenes ? How can we approach this question ? Happy to share this recent review written with Samuele Virgili where we ask these questions at the level of the retina. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Exposition Bridget Riley et Seurat au musée d’Orsay jusqu’au 26 janvier, l’artiste presque centenaire, gloire de l’art cinétique, eu la révélation des interactions des couleurs en copiant Seurat en 1959. L’occasion rare de faire l’expérience sensible des liens reliant ces 2 géants de la perception

This head is spinning continuously, but we see it rotating back and forth... ...presumably because of our strong prior expectation that faces are convex. This is a very nice example of the Hollow-Face illusion promoted by Richard Gregory: www.richardgregory.org/experiments/

Excellent work @victorcalbiagueg.bsky.social !!!

Excited to share our paper now published in Cell! 'Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background' Huge thanks to @neurofishh.bsky.social & @teuler.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social @cp-cell.bsky.social 👇🏻 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

This is really cool work! Congrats, Olivier, and the whole team!

Happy to share my first work with a connection to myopia, a collaboration with EssilorLuxottica www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!) Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov.... 1/11

11/n This way, this inhibition “piggybacks” on existing circuits. Revealing that the retina doesn’t build new circuits for every computation — it repurposes existing ones, using limited wiring to perform multiple computations efficiently. ♻️

10/n Mechanistically, we propose that ON stimulation in the surround may trigger crossover inhibition that suppresses wide-field GABAergic amacrine cells—normally responsible for surround suppression—thereby disinhibiting distant OFF ganglion cells.

6/n This setup let us directly stimulate individual rod bipolar cells while recording retinal output in real time. Result? Activating single RBCs drove responses in OFF ganglion cells far beyond their receptive field center 💥

5/n So, to tackle this we combined: ✨ Optogenetics — to control specific neurons ✨ Two-photon holography — to activate single cells precisely ✨ Multi-electrode recordings — to monitor hundreds of ganglion cells simultaneously

3/n Our hunch: a circuit best known for rod vision — the rod bipolar (RBC) → AII amacrine pathway — might also shape these surround responses under brighter conditions. 🌙➡️💡

🚨 New preprint out from our lab! 📄 The Rod Bipolar Cell Pathway Contributes to Surround Responses in OFF Retinal Ganglion Cells 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We’re hiring! We’re looking for two RAs to study neuroplasticity in sight loss, sight rescue and development in children and adults @ucl.ac.uk using a wide range of neuroimaging and behavioral methods. Please help spread the word! Apply by 16 Oct! t.ly/q3aYe #neurojobs #NeuroSkyence

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

If you are looking for a book to read and are interested in computational/systems neuroscience or AI, I have a suggestion: trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/a-recommen...

A very clear, detailed, and fair account on the (obscure?) French way to distribute positions in academia, and then manage to actually do some research! Thanks Olivier

In case this is helpful for anyone, here is a post on how to get a job in french academia : trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/getting-a-... Aimed at non-french scientists who are curious, but french ones may find it useful too.

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics Today in bioRxiv 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

Some people see spontaneous faint flickering flashes in their visual field, a condition known as Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS, not to be confused with @vssmtg.bsky.social). Maybe a visual equivalent of the auditory tinnitus? Here is a very nice study from the lab of @sengelweb.bsky.social.

Seeking input: A standardized nomenclature for the rods and cones of the vertebrate retina A number of us have been working on a proposal to bring various disconnected naming systems for the vertebrate rods and cones across species into alignment. The basic proposal looks like this:

If you are interested in the contribution of Ibn al-Haytham to vision science, and if you don’t mind reading French, I recommend the book of Michel Imbert “La fin du regard éclairant” www.vrin.fr/livre/978271...

as a side effect of a sort of "false-fusion" cos the binoc pair acts like a spatial filter. A binoc extension of the previous filter model does the trick, reproduces the newborn results. The results don't imply an "innate neural face representation". The inference was flawed. doi.org/10.1111/desc...

New post: What chess (may have) taught me about neuroscience. trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/what-chess...

Good resolution of 2025: start a blog for thoughts that cannot go in papers (too speculative or preliminary).

Besides being beautiful, the different grouping principles on display across the different artists here is fascinating. It would be fun to see how consistent each person is in terms of how they approach lots of different patterns! #VisionScience

Clever study that explores the debate between those who claim that color categories are 'innate' and those who argue that they are dependent on language. It turns out that monkeys, unlike humans, do not have consensus color categories, suggesting cognitive mechanisms such as language are required.🧪🧠

🧠 Wonderful speaker in the Neurocolloquium on Jan 23, at 4.15pm: Emilie Macé, Prof in the EXC Cluster Multiscale Bioimaging in Göttingen on how "Visual objects refine the encoding of head direction", live & in Zoom Host: Robert Ohlendorf @maxplanckcampus.bsky.social Sign up forms.gle/RoxUFPrj6Dyr...

My first Bluesky post is to announce a Tenure-Track Faculty Search at the Jules Stein Eye Institute of UCLA. We are considering applications at the Assistant and Associate professor levels. Apply here: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10092. DM or email me with any questions. Please distribute!

Do you want to study cognitive science and live in Paris? Our master’s program in Cognitive Science at @ENS_ULM, @psl_univ, and @EHESS_fr is now accepting applications for 2025-2026. All courses are in English. Deadline: 13 March 2025 More info: master-cognitive-science.ens.psl.eu/en

What if… spontaneous neural activity 🧠 reflects the baseline rumblings of a brainwide dynamical system initialized for learning? We find that the rumblings have macroscopic properties like those emerging from linear symmetric, critical systems 🧵 #neuroscience #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very likely that the record will be broken tonight ! 10 days earlier than the previous one, what an amazing feat !

How can the brain make predictions, and signal prediction errors ? Together with Simone Ebert, Thomas Buffet, Bruno Cessac et al, we studied this question in the retina in this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A thread

Our paper on how the neuromodulator nitric oxide modulates a subset of mouse retinal ganglion cells is finally published in @elife.bsky.social doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Great work by @dgonschorek.bsky.social together with the lab of @oliviermarre.bsky.social and @matigoldin.bsky.social, ...

Spherical code of retinal orientation-selectivity enables decoding in ensembled and retinotopic operation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.08.631850v1

Thrilled to announce that my lab has been awarded the Research to Prevent Blindness Career Development Award! Now the lab has a *funded* opening for a post-doctoral fellow interested in studying neurodevelopmental disorders in the retina. More info here! www.vlasitslab.org/joinus

If you are not following the Vendee Globe ( www.vendeeglobe.org/en/tracker ) yet, it is about time. A thread about why:

This was a really fun collaboration and I hope everyone enjoys the paper! Please let us know if you have any feedback! media.giphy.com/media/pbG8W7...

"The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None" osf.io/preprints/ps... (this is a more systematic examination of the thing I was looking at a few days ago)

We all learned the center-surround, rod and cone structure, but this is a lot of detail about glia and blood vessels in the retina and what happens in degeneration. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... #MATLAB #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

My Christmas gift to you fellow neurophysiologists: "Theory of axo-axonic inhibition". www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Horace Barlow, by all accounts, was thinking about 30 years ahead of his time. Here is a transcript of the opening keynote I gave at a symposium honoring Horace's scientific legacy: markusmeister.com/2024/12/14/h....

Christmas motion illusion. The trees are completely stationary. I am currently studying the explanations for this kind of illusion.

The unbearable slowness of being: Humans still clock in at just 10 bits/s. Even after peer review :) Share link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1kHVa3BtfH.... ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

This was 2020. Fast forward a few years and it became clear this was not working as intended: Many models, even very implausible ones, explained the data equally well. We also tried this with other variables, often with the same result. 9/n

I am thrilled to announce that Rich Kramer and I are co-directing a BRAND NEW hands-on visual neuroscience course at the MBL. August 1-16, 2025. Details in this flyer. Trainees please apply. And everyone, please spread the word!

Neuroscience students asked us to teach a PRACTICAL course on experimental methods, and it is now on YouTube! Please like and repost to help us get the word out! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Lecture 1: Signals and data acquisition Focusing on hardware, digital/analog I/O, synchronization 🧵

🚨 Preprint! We combine our recent open dataset of #APC prices with the article counts per journal-year from #OpenAlex to estimate how much the academic community has paid in APCs over the last 5 years. A. $8.349 billion ($8.968 B in 2023 USD) $2.5B in 2023 alone. arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551 #metasci