Cross-validated model comparison shows that humans predominantly relied on generative representations, mice on discriminative boundary-tracking, and rats spanned both regimes. Moreover, all species achieved statistical adaptation with similar efficiency.

We contrasted two models:
• Stimulus–Category (generative): agents update beliefs about the distribution of sensory inputs within each category.
• Boundary–Estimation (discriminative): agents update only their belief about the category boundary location, ignoring within-category structure.

All species adapted behaviour near-optimally, consistent with a normative observer constrained by sensory and decision noise.
Look only at final performance, and all species seem to behave the same.

We trained humans, rats, & mice on the same auditory categorisation task, holding category boundaries and rewards constant while varying sensory statistics (ie sound distribution within each category).
This isolates how each species learns from sensory structure, not from reward or decision biases.

Heron’s main principle is to allow researchers to design and implement the experimental flow as close as possible to their mental schemata of the experiment, in the form of a Knowledge Graph. Self documentation and ease of reconstruction/reconfiguration comes for free.

9/

Bonsai, is a tool that is very easy to use and put together simple experiments. However, it gets more difficult as the complexity of experiments increases.

6/

You may think, but wait, don't we have already a few pretty good options, like Bonsai & ROS?

Yes, they're powerful and great tools, but the ROS is mainly built in C++ and so it is not an easy tool for many experimentalists to use.

5/

It's so heartbreaking to see one of the 'three angry old men'* flirting w the idea of bombing a country so nonchalantly.

Like 90million ppl are at the mercy of the 'noise' in his drift diffusion process--is it accumulating to this bound or that bound😞

*see this: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“Dear citizens, for your safety, we ask you to immediately leave the mentioned area in District 3 of Tehran” says the IDF.

While I was still on the phone w my dad to see where they are, the attack started (less than 1.5hr after the notice).
FYI, Tehran's population is ~17m. What a joke of a notice!

An example of biased media these days, dehumanizing one side--Iran killing civilians (which is of course tragic), vs Israel hitting military sites.

No, Iranian civilians have been killed in every single attack by Israel since Friday (in hundreds so far). Don't rebrand it.

#StopTheWar
#NoToWar

Though our main focus was sensory history representations, we found reward (and choice) history, too, in the rat posterior parietal cortex.
www.nature.com/articles/nat...

At today's Cosyne poster session, Quentin Pajot-Moric will present "Studying sensory statistics and priors during sound categorisation in head-fixed mice"

#cosyne2025

Friends at #cosyne2025, this year we have two posters and two workshop talks.

Tonight, Dammy Onih is going to present his results on incidental statistical learning (decoupled from reward) in mice, using pupillometry, hippocampal inactivation and ephys.

It felt so good to read the email sent by the @ucl.ac.uk UCL President & Provost, Michael Spence, on diversity and pluralism at UCL (and academia in general). See an excerpt.

Stand your ground, folks!

& a very recent article, probing trust in scientists & their role in society in 68 countries, based on responses from >71k participants (bet Nov2022-Aug2023).

Overall, the level of trust is far from concerning in many places, though I'm surprised by certain countries

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Go click on each of those sections: 'page not found'. They're taking down pages, 'NIH Office of Research on Women's Health', try 'CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey', or 'Health Disparities Among LGBTQ Youth'..whatever they dislike, exactly as planned in Project2025 (by Heritage Foundation). I'm furious

A bit late, but just to say how lucky I feel that I could spend a week at #Imbizo2025 summer school @imbizo.bsky.social, hanging out w/ this group of absolutely brilliant students, their dedicated TAs & other faculty. Watch out for this pool of talent! & consider applying/contributing next rounds

Another happy and proud moment -- introducing Dr. Dammy Onih, who just passed his PhD viva!🎉🥳

We were so excited to have snow in London over the weekend that we made this snowman. Consider it a historical achievement. And we're glad we did it at 1am, as it was snowing, since nothing of that snow survived the night.