Out in @elife.bsky.social! Lora and the Roeper lab discovered a new mechanism by which surviving dopamine neurons recover their function in a model of Parkinson's - a key step for understanding this disease! @goetheuni.bsky.social @uabneuro.bsky.social elifesciences.org/articles/104...

Alright rat #neuroskyence community, lock in! We have an #OpenScienceWeek treat for you. You've asked for it in our DMs, comments, and SfN booth. 🥁🥁🥁 MapMyCells can now map rat data and map it onto any of our mouse or human taxonomies! More info: community.brain-map.org/t/new-featur...

I'm super happy to have the lab featured on @thetransmitter.bsky.social, my favorite place for neuroscience news! #neuroskyence @uabneuro.bsky.social

I am extremely grateful to the @pfresearchteam.bsky.social for this great opportunity!

The lab has received a Parkinson's Foundation Impact Award! Together with @poonamthakur.bsky.social, we will explore how dopamine signaling changes in early PD impacts cognition. We are honored and grateful for this opportunity! proposalcentral.com/Insights/E_E... @parkinsondotorg.bsky.social

GREAT NEWS! Our paper on dopamine signaling of valueless prediction errors is out in Science Advances @science.org! I found that striatal dopamine tracks cue-cue prediction errors in sensory preconditioning, which goes against model-free ideas of dopamine function www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Funding updates coming soon, and the lab is looking to recruit motivated postdocs, grad students, or postbacs with expertise in rodent behavior, stereotactic surgery, and neural data analysis. Come help us figure out the neural mechanisms of learning and cognition! See link: www.kmcostalab.com/join

This one is special - through my collaborator Anderson Herculano, we received a special grant from Brazil for collaborations with expat Brazilian PIs like me. I am beyond thrilled to start working with my alma mater @ufpa.bsky.social on Amazonian research applied to the brain and mental health🥳

This is a fantastic program. I learned quite a lot. Strongly recommend applying!

Thrilled to see this great work by Bsky-less Wenhui Zong out in @natneuro.nature.com! It was a pleasure to contribute to this! The findings are wonderfully counterintuitive and provide surprising insight on the circuit bases of abstract representations in learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wonderful stand up for science rally in Birmingham! Well attended, gorgeous weather, and great thoughts!!

Love this - it reflects many things that I had thought about and debated heatedly with others. I will print this out for future arguments. 🧐

We are super happy to present our first preprint - the effect of our Rethinking Naturalistic Behaviour Workshop - where we look more critically at the term "naturalistic behaviour" and point to its vagueness and inconsistency in its use! osf.io/preprints/os...

I am happy to share my latest (NIH funded) work, out in @currentbiology.bsky.social ! We show that task demands define the correlations between accumbal dopamine and acetylcholine, in a pattern that supports a tripartite coincidence model of striatal plasticity. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In these turbulent times, I am happy to share our NIH-supported paper in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Led by Zhewei Zhang, we discuss the rigor needed to rule out TDRL models of dopamine function - after all, when you aim at the king, you better not miss🎯 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Good start of 2025! Happy that this paper from @MoussawiKhaled lab, which I had the great pleasure to help with, is now online in its final version. This study rigorously tested the cue reactivity hypothesis of dopamine in addiction, with surprising results! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Meet our 2024 cohort of Next Generation Leaders! For the next 3 years, they will network with other rising stars, participate in professional development, and share their ideas for future research directions.

Lab Christmas party! Seemed appropriate to celebrate a great year (and our first successful surgeries!) with tasty treats, hot cocoa with marshmallows, and a Secret Santa 😁 I hope the building and learning we all did this year will bear fruit in 2025!

I am thrilled to see how quickly neuroscience has evolved on this platform! I already have way more, and more meaningful, engagement here than I ever had on X. It feels like a social media just for neuroscience, with little distractions - which is what I always wanted 🥳🧠

With all the recent commotion, I ended up never sharing the lab's first picnic/hiking trip. We had a blast! 😄 It may seem like a cliche, but having the chance to guide sharp, dedicated, and enthusiastic people is truly one of the best parts of being a PI. So happy to celebrate our fledgling team!

Someone once told me that every lab is a journey that starts in an empty room(s). Yesterday I got mine. So it begins 🧠🐀

I'm excited to present two different stories this SFN, one in a Sunday PM mini-symposium chaired by the great @purely_science, and another in a Tuesday PM poster. Hop by to talk some science, and if you'd like to join my new lab! - kmcostalab.com

Faculty profile page is out! Super excited to start the lab in a few months! www.uab.edu/cas/psycholo...

I took the suggestion to join Blue sky! I'm starting my lab soon at UAB, where I'll be investigating neural mechanisms of learning, focusing on dopamine, frontal cortex, basal ganglia, and latent learning. My website is kmcostalab.com, and I'm looking to hire at all levels, including a lab manager!