Neuro-communication
@neurocommunication.bsky.social
Reposted by Neuro-communication
With great sadness, we heard from Masashi Kawasaki's death. He was/is a role model for so many Neuroethologists with a keen interest in weakly electric fish.
Günther Zupanc wrote an Obiturary for J Comp Physiol A.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Günther Zupanc wrote an Obiturary for J Comp Physiol A.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Masashi Kawasaki (1955–2025): neuroethologist who explored neural mechanisms of echolocation in bats and of electric behavior in fish - Journal of Comparative Physiology A
Masashi Kawasaki tragically died in a car accident on May 18, 2025. A dedicated neuroethologist and beloved faculty member at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, he spent over four decades ex...
link.springer.com
August 4, 2025 at 10:08 AM
With great sadness, we heard from Masashi Kawasaki's death. He was/is a role model for so many Neuroethologists with a keen interest in weakly electric fish.
Günther Zupanc wrote an Obiturary for J Comp Physiol A.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Günther Zupanc wrote an Obiturary for J Comp Physiol A.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Reposted by Neuro-communication
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
I am happy to share our new preprint! In this work, we proposed a theory about how zebra finches bootstrap their error signals for self-guided RL via predictive coding 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Correctness is its own reward: bootstrapping error signals in self-guided reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling account of how agents learn complex behaviors by trial and error, yet RL is predicated on the existence of a reward function provided by the agent's env...
www.biorxiv.org
July 24, 2025 at 2:29 PM
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
"Our study highlights both the advancements in LLM capabilities and their persistent limitations, raising the possibility of systematic differences in semantic memory structures between humans and LLMs in representing color-word associations" link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Advancements and limitations of LLMs in replicating human color-word associations - Discover Artificial Intelligence
Color-word associations play a fundamental role in human cognition and design applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) have become widely available and have demonstrated intelligent behaviors in var...
link.springer.com
June 17, 2025 at 11:42 AM
"Our study highlights both the advancements in LLM capabilities and their persistent limitations, raising the possibility of systematic differences in semantic memory structures between humans and LLMs in representing color-word associations" link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Reposted by Neuro-communication
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
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
June 11, 2025 at 10:24 PM
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
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
Reposted by Neuro-communication
The neuroscientists are clear that they examined 'structural and relational comparisons among qualia' and were not 'measuring' qualia themselves, whatever that might mean. Sabine Hossenfelder is usually entertaining and accurate, but not this time.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40050292/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40050292/
June 7, 2025 at 11:31 PM
The neuroscientists are clear that they examined 'structural and relational comparisons among qualia' and were not 'measuring' qualia themselves, whatever that might mean. Sabine Hossenfelder is usually entertaining and accurate, but not this time.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40050292/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40050292/
Reposted by Neuro-communication
Why Tononi et al's defense of IIT fails to convince me. medium.com/@kording/86f...
Why Tononi’s Defense of IIT Fails to Convince Me
I am one of the co-signers of the letter labeling IIT as “pseudoscience” for numerous reasons. These include a definition of…
medium.com
March 10, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Why Tononi et al's defense of IIT fails to convince me. medium.com/@kording/86f...
Reposted by Neuro-communication
As we attempt to build autonomous AI systems, we're discovering that agency—a capability we take for granted in animals—may be much more complex than we imagined, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social, in the latest essay in our NeuroAI series.
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/neur...
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/neur...
NeuroAI and the hidden complexity of agency
As we attempt to build autonomous AI systems, we’re discovering that a capability we take for granted in animals may be more complex than we imagined.
www.thetransmitter.org
February 5, 2025 at 2:23 PM
As we attempt to build autonomous AI systems, we're discovering that agency—a capability we take for granted in animals—may be much more complex than we imagined, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social, in the latest essay in our NeuroAI series.
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/neur...
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/neur...
Reposted by Neuro-communication
Sorry IIT ain’t general relativity. Funny they would choose this parallel.
Recent pseudoscience accusation echoes historic pushback against general relativity: http://osf.io/awys2/
December 11, 2024 at 2:55 PM
Sorry IIT ain’t general relativity. Funny they would choose this parallel.
Reposted by Neuro-communication
UCSF hosted its first food pantry event for postdocs today, where a local food bank gives free food to UCSF employees.
This picture represents about half the line that had formed 10 minutes before the market had opened.
What the fuck are we doing here guys?
This picture represents about half the line that had formed 10 minutes before the market had opened.
What the fuck are we doing here guys?
November 21, 2024 at 2:04 AM
UCSF hosted its first food pantry event for postdocs today, where a local food bank gives free food to UCSF employees.
This picture represents about half the line that had formed 10 minutes before the market had opened.
What the fuck are we doing here guys?
This picture represents about half the line that had formed 10 minutes before the market had opened.
What the fuck are we doing here guys?
Reposted by Neuro-communication
Bonobos and chimps, two very closely related primates, have wildly different social interactions. (Bonobos resolve conflict through sex, chimps through violence)
Would we not expect innate differences in "pro-sociality" to play a role in these species-typical differences?
Would we not expect innate differences in "pro-sociality" to play a role in these species-typical differences?
Another nativist claim, that infants have innate pro-sociality, fails upon closer inspection. Not completely surprising, as Damian Scarf’s elegant paper showed that even if such patterns emerged, it would likely be explained by simple associative processes. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
November 28, 2024 at 4:16 PM
Bonobos and chimps, two very closely related primates, have wildly different social interactions. (Bonobos resolve conflict through sex, chimps through violence)
Would we not expect innate differences in "pro-sociality" to play a role in these species-typical differences?
Would we not expect innate differences in "pro-sociality" to play a role in these species-typical differences?
Reposted by Neuro-communication
Reposted by Neuro-communication
For those of us who think about things like seeing and remembering, the idea that we’d measure via subjective Qs is easy to skoff at. UNTIL you realize objective approaches won’t work for some impt things (like mood). A nice review supporting “subjective” measures.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Self-reports are better measurement instruments than implicit measures
Nature Reviews Psychology - Implicit measures are widely used because they are assumed to be superior to self-reports. In this Perspective, Corneille and Gawronski challenge this view and argue...
www.nature.com
October 21, 2024 at 11:58 PM
For those of us who think about things like seeing and remembering, the idea that we’d measure via subjective Qs is easy to skoff at. UNTIL you realize objective approaches won’t work for some impt things (like mood). A nice review supporting “subjective” measures.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
www.nature.com/articles/s44...