iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Balma Serrano Porcar

Demetrio Ferro @d-ferro.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Excited to share our latest publication, out now in @natcomms.nature.com !🧠🔍 Accumulating virtual rewards enhances both decision-making accuracy and neural value encoding in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex by dynamically shifting a goal-dependent internal reference point. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Finally recovered after #FENS2026 and #BARCCSYN satellite. What inspiring days! I had the opportunity to present my PhD work on how our brain maintains decisions in short-term memory, exchange ideas with researchers around the world and catch up with former lab mates.

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

From there, an easy GUI feature that could be included is a training progress bar per subject, based on their current stage relative to the total number of stages.

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

The TV requires a detailed characterization of subject training, but not all users need to know that detail. Once the behavioral parameters defining forward/backward progression in training are well-defined, a single user can code the logic once, and the system handles these decisions automatically

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

So delighted to participate in the Neural Networks of Memory Integration symposium at #Fens2026! Paula Gómez Sotres, Marta Barrera Conde, Sheena Josselyn, and I will explore how neural circuits in rodents encode, maintain, and dynamically reshape memory representations. 🗓️ July 9 at 15:40 in Hall C

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

#FENS2026 is just around the corner, and I’m thrilled that this year it’s taking place in my beloved Barcelona! If you’re interested in neural dynamics of choice selection and maintenance in short-term memory, stop by my poster on Tuesday morning (PS01-07AM-305) Looking forward to seeing you there!

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Next week I will present online our work on the Training Village at the Behavior Forum. It is a pleasure to be part of this community! 🗓️Save the date: March 12, 12:30–14:00 CET 🔗Zoom link: helsinki.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Check out the preprint and the system webpage for more details braincircuitsbehaviorlab.github.io/village/inde... Interested in being a beta tester? Get in touch! ☎️ (🧵10/10)

braincircuitsbehaviorlab.github.io

Training village

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

HUGE THANKS to all the lab members involved, especially Javier Rodríguez, Hernando Martínez, and Caterina Barezzi. And to Alex Taylor, Harsh Vasoya, Donna Kean, and Duncan Pottinger for their amazing work adapting the system for rats🐀 (🧵9/10)

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

The system brings rodent training to a new level of automation, improving welfare and enhancing reproducibility. If you are tired of spending several hours per day training animals, try it! You’ll never want to train manually again (🧵8/10

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Thanks to collaboration with @eknapska.bsky.social and @alicjapuscian.bsky.social, we integrated the TV with the Eco-HAB to monitor home cage activity, and observed that before training, animals sleep💤 and after they eat🧀. Opening new ways to study how ethology interacts with cognition (🧵7/10)

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

The Training Village is designed to be wrapped around any existing behavioral system without requiring users to change their current task paradigms. We tested it using multiple operant paradigms of varying complexity and observed high task engagement and performance over months (🧵6/10)

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Animals used the Training Village very efficiently: they occupied the operant box the majority of the time, coordinated their entrances among them, and quickly progressed across training stages of increasing difficulty (🧵5/10)

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

The Training Village is designed to be operated remotely. The GUI enables user-friendly monitoring and control of system functions. It also features a Telegram alarm system, allowing users to receive real-time notifications on their phones 📳 and control the system from any remote location (🧵4/10)

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

In the Training Village, group-housed rodents live in enriched arenas with access to an operant box at any time. The system ensures individualized training using a corridor that connects the home cages with the operant box and contains motorized doors, RFID detectors, and video analysis (🧵3/10)

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Since then, together with the help of Rafael Marin and @jrochav.bsky.social guidance, we created the Training Village🐭💡⚙️, an automatic, open-source platform for continuous rodent training in cognitively demanding tasks (🧵2/10)

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Balma Serrano Porcar @balmaserrano.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

I am very excited to share my first preprint🎉 The pandemic kicked off strongly during the first year of my PhD, and I had to stop the behavioral experiments when mice were starting to understand the task. At the BCB Lab, this showed us that training automation could be a real game changer (🧵1/10)

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Reposted by Balma Serrano Porcar

Melanie Tschiersch @mtschiersch.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

🚨Excited to share my first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social🚨 with the amazing Smith lab, @jbarbosa.org and Albert Compte who made this work possible. We show that 🐒prefrontal hemispheres combine redundancy (for precision) & weak connections (for capacity) for supporting spatial working memory (WM). 1/🧵

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Reposted by Balma Serrano Porcar

Joao Barbosa @jbarbosa.org · 22/11/2024

Since no one did it, here is a list of people doing research on working memory. The list is admittedly biased (based on the people I follow), so please help: don't hesitate to let me know of someone missing. I will happily follow and add them to the list! Please RT🙏 go.bsky.app/8ZsVgMo

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