Vinny Costa
@vincentcostaphd.bsky.social
Neuroscientist (PhD) exploring how the primate 🧠 learns and decides, while exploiting the consumption of 🍕 and 🥯
Lab website: www.fullcolorbrain.com
SYR/UFL/NIMH/ONPRC/EMORY
Lab website: www.fullcolorbrain.com
SYR/UFL/NIMH/ONPRC/EMORY
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Interested in spatiotemporal decoding of choice and feedback in the human brain?
My lab’s postdoc Rohit Yadav will present these beautiful MEG results from our novelty bandit at #SFN2025 Sunday 11/16, PSTR094.23 / LL8 (top row: explore vs exploit; bottom: reward vs nonreward)
My lab’s postdoc Rohit Yadav will present these beautiful MEG results from our novelty bandit at #SFN2025 Sunday 11/16, PSTR094.23 / LL8 (top row: explore vs exploit; bottom: reward vs nonreward)
November 15, 2025 at 2:11 AM
Interested in spatiotemporal decoding of choice and feedback in the human brain?
My lab’s postdoc Rohit Yadav will present these beautiful MEG results from our novelty bandit at #SFN2025 Sunday 11/16, PSTR094.23 / LL8 (top row: explore vs exploit; bottom: reward vs nonreward)
My lab’s postdoc Rohit Yadav will present these beautiful MEG results from our novelty bandit at #SFN2025 Sunday 11/16, PSTR094.23 / LL8 (top row: explore vs exploit; bottom: reward vs nonreward)
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Amazingly ~100 people from NINDS NIH will be going to the Society for Neuroscience #SfN meeting in San Diego! Seek out the booth and posters and please pass on your Neuroscience Love!
Kudos to administrators who got their travel in place despite the shutdown!
www.ninds.nih.gov/news-events/...
Kudos to administrators who got their travel in place despite the shutdown!
www.ninds.nih.gov/news-events/...
November 14, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Amazingly ~100 people from NINDS NIH will be going to the Society for Neuroscience #SfN meeting in San Diego! Seek out the booth and posters and please pass on your Neuroscience Love!
Kudos to administrators who got their travel in place despite the shutdown!
www.ninds.nih.gov/news-events/...
Kudos to administrators who got their travel in place despite the shutdown!
www.ninds.nih.gov/news-events/...
If you think that the “Mante task” is the gold standard for context dependent decision making I suggest you look up and discover:
Reversal learning
Set shifting
Fear conditioning and extinction
The entirety of behavioral neuroscience…
bsky.app/profile/jbar...
Reversal learning
Set shifting
Fear conditioning and extinction
The entirety of behavioral neuroscience…
bsky.app/profile/jbar...
Rats can do the Mante task, arguably the gold standard of context dependent decision making
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Individual variability of neural computations underlying flexible decisions - Nature
Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among...
www.nature.com
November 13, 2025 at 2:27 AM
If you think that the “Mante task” is the gold standard for context dependent decision making I suggest you look up and discover:
Reversal learning
Set shifting
Fear conditioning and extinction
The entirety of behavioral neuroscience…
bsky.app/profile/jbar...
Reversal learning
Set shifting
Fear conditioning and extinction
The entirety of behavioral neuroscience…
bsky.app/profile/jbar...
Reposted by Vinny Costa
tell any interested in UCSD neuro/cogsci/psych to email colorsofthebrain@gmail.com and I'll link them up as best I can!
November 10, 2025 at 7:33 PM
tell any interested in UCSD neuro/cogsci/psych to email colorsofthebrain@gmail.com and I'll link them up as best I can!
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of brain-computer interfaces and artificial neural networks. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk, write Cory Miller, @movshon.bsky.social and Doris Tsao.
#neuroskyence
bit.ly/47MXYLH
#neuroskyence
bit.ly/47MXYLH
Without monkeys, neuroscience has no future
Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of BCIs, ANNs. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk.
bit.ly
November 10, 2025 at 2:56 PM
Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of brain-computer interfaces and artificial neural networks. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk, write Cory Miller, @movshon.bsky.social and Doris Tsao.
#neuroskyence
bit.ly/47MXYLH
#neuroskyence
bit.ly/47MXYLH
The real bummer about no one from NIH being able to attend SfN is all the postbacs that would be applying to graduate school this year won’t have the opportunity to network with potential faculty mentors at their posters or attend the graduate school fair.
November 10, 2025 at 6:32 PM
The real bummer about no one from NIH being able to attend SfN is all the postbacs that would be applying to graduate school this year won’t have the opportunity to network with potential faculty mentors at their posters or attend the graduate school fair.
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Our intelligence and cognitive abilities are perhaps due to an expansion of our cerebral cortex. But surprisingly, compared to highly intelligent birds, primates have many more neurons in their cerebellum as compared to the cerebral cortex.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
November 9, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Our intelligence and cognitive abilities are perhaps due to an expansion of our cerebral cortex. But surprisingly, compared to highly intelligent birds, primates have many more neurons in their cerebellum as compared to the cerebral cortex.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Still think brain regions don’t exist? That everything is everywhere? That cell types don’t matter and that everything is a dynamical phase portrait?
Wrong.
Interconnected brain modules exist at the level of fine grained transcriptomics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Wrong.
Interconnected brain modules exist at the level of fine grained transcriptomics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Whole-cortex in situ sequencing reveals input-dependent area identity - Nature
BARseq interrogates the expression of 104 cell-type marker genes in 10.3 million cells over nine mouse forebrain hemispheres to reveal the role of peripheral inputs on cortical area development.
www.nature.com
November 6, 2025 at 12:39 PM
Still think brain regions don’t exist? That everything is everywhere? That cell types don’t matter and that everything is a dynamical phase portrait?
Wrong.
Interconnected brain modules exist at the level of fine grained transcriptomics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Wrong.
Interconnected brain modules exist at the level of fine grained transcriptomics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reposted by Vinny Costa
The Computational and Cognitive Neural Sciences lab (ballardlab.org) at UC Riverside is recruiting psychology PhD students to join our team! Check out the flyer to learn about the lab and our stellar research community at UCR. Apply by 12/1!
drive.google.com/file/d/19m8i...
drive.google.com/file/d/19m8i...
November 5, 2025 at 9:29 PM
The Computational and Cognitive Neural Sciences lab (ballardlab.org) at UC Riverside is recruiting psychology PhD students to join our team! Check out the flyer to learn about the lab and our stellar research community at UCR. Apply by 12/1!
drive.google.com/file/d/19m8i...
drive.google.com/file/d/19m8i...
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.
The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.
Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.
Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
November 4, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.
The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.
Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.
Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Picard: there ARE FOUR GUYS! FOUR
November 3, 2025 at 4:48 PM
Picard: there ARE FOUR GUYS! FOUR
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Will be posting stained glass action potentials on my website at 1pm EST today! Www.brainedglass.com
November 1, 2025 at 3:10 PM
Will be posting stained glass action potentials on my website at 1pm EST today! Www.brainedglass.com
Reposted by Vinny Costa
October 30, 2025 at 11:47 PM
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Excited to share the latest from the lab on the molecular mechanisms of silencing and un-silencing a hippocampal engram ensemble. Was fun using a variant of the EPSILON technique developed by Adam Cohen's lab.
(1/2)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
(1/2)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Molecular mechanisms mediating engram ensemble retrievability state in mice
Engrams, ensembles of neurons that store memories, exist along a continuum of retrievability. Normally, sensory cues can reactivate a latent engram to…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 30, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Excited to share the latest from the lab on the molecular mechanisms of silencing and un-silencing a hippocampal engram ensemble. Was fun using a variant of the EPSILON technique developed by Adam Cohen's lab.
(1/2)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
(1/2)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Back in my day, AI used to stand for Adobe Illustrator! And we hated that, too!
October 29, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Back in my day, AI used to stand for Adobe Illustrator! And we hated that, too!
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature!
www.nature.com/articles/s4...
www.nature.com/articles/s4...
Sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits
Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...
www.nature.com
October 29, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature!
www.nature.com/articles/s4...
www.nature.com/articles/s4...
This is wild. Now do it in a dolphin or a duck where half the brain stays awake. It’s freaky how little we know about neural bases of sleep compared to say…noise correlations in V4.
bsky.app/profile/eddy...
bsky.app/profile/eddy...
My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic - Nature Neuroscience
Li et al. propose a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of falling asleep based on electroencephalogram data. They show that a tipping point marks the brain’s nonlinear wake-to-sleep transiti...
www.nature.com
October 28, 2025 at 11:17 PM
This is wild. Now do it in a dolphin or a duck where half the brain stays awake. It’s freaky how little we know about neural bases of sleep compared to say…noise correlations in V4.
bsky.app/profile/eddy...
bsky.app/profile/eddy...
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Sharing this post-doc opportunity to work with one of my favorite humans, Nick Gilpin at LSU! Besides getting to do amazing neuroscience research, you get to live in New Orleans!!!
October 28, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Sharing this post-doc opportunity to work with one of my favorite humans, Nick Gilpin at LSU! Besides getting to do amazing neuroscience research, you get to live in New Orleans!!!
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Psychedelics alter neurovascular coupling, which means we need to critically re-evaluate fMRI findings of acute psychedelic effects
#neuroskyence
#PsychSciSky
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroskyence
#PsychSciSky
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Psychedelic 5-HT2A receptor agonism alters neurovascular coupling and differentially affects neuronal and hemodynamic measures of brain function - Nature Neuroscience
Padawer-Curry et al. show that the hallucinogenic 5-HT2A receptor agonist DOI alters neurovascular coupling in mice, with implications for the interpretation of human fMRI studies of psychedelics.
www.nature.com
October 27, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Psychedelics alter neurovascular coupling, which means we need to critically re-evaluate fMRI findings of acute psychedelic effects
#neuroskyence
#PsychSciSky
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroskyence
#PsychSciSky
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Since I can’t work my day job, I’m back to my side gig. 7 handmade dichroic stained glass brains up for grabs tonight at 7pm EST at www.brainedglass.com
October 22, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Since I can’t work my day job, I’m back to my side gig. 7 handmade dichroic stained glass brains up for grabs tonight at 7pm EST at www.brainedglass.com
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Senior Lecturer Position in Computational Neuroscience at Vanderbilt. Please disseminate.
apply.interfolio.com/173997
apply.interfolio.com/173997
Apply - Interfolio
{{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
October 22, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Senior Lecturer Position in Computational Neuroscience at Vanderbilt. Please disseminate.
apply.interfolio.com/173997
apply.interfolio.com/173997
Reposted by Vinny Costa
Very thought-provoking post by @prakhargodara.bsky.social. Is confirmation bias/positivity bias a statistical "ghost" of model specification? Specifically not including temporally decaying learning rates? The evidence suggests this is not the case and here is why (1/n)
Is confirmation bias a real cognitive flaw, or a statistical ghost created by our models? My new PNAS paper shows a startling result: fitting Q-learning models to behavior in bandit tasks detect a bias, even from the behavior of a perfectly rational Bayesian learner.
October 19, 2025 at 8:22 AM
Very thought-provoking post by @prakhargodara.bsky.social. Is confirmation bias/positivity bias a statistical "ghost" of model specification? Specifically not including temporally decaying learning rates? The evidence suggests this is not the case and here is why (1/n)
Hot take…asking whether mechanisms relevant for flies remembering odors aligns with those underlying working memory in primates is silly.
Mushroom bodies and lateral prefrontal cortex aren’t even close to an example of convergent evolution.
bsky.app/profile/blue...
Mushroom bodies and lateral prefrontal cortex aren’t even close to an example of convergent evolution.
bsky.app/profile/blue...
At #BernsteinConference heated debate on WM mechanisms. I love that this is still far to be settled!
trained RNNs from A.Compte aligns with fruitfly direction WM data from K.Nagel: it is persistent.
Large scale recording in macaque V1 in T.Moore Lab: it is not.
#neuroskyence what's your take?
trained RNNs from A.Compte aligns with fruitfly direction WM data from K.Nagel: it is persistent.
Large scale recording in macaque V1 in T.Moore Lab: it is not.
#neuroskyence what's your take?
October 9, 2025 at 12:03 AM
Hot take…asking whether mechanisms relevant for flies remembering odors aligns with those underlying working memory in primates is silly.
Mushroom bodies and lateral prefrontal cortex aren’t even close to an example of convergent evolution.
bsky.app/profile/blue...
Mushroom bodies and lateral prefrontal cortex aren’t even close to an example of convergent evolution.
bsky.app/profile/blue...