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Ahmed El Hady @zamakany.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Reposted by David Robbe

New Study! @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social Often foraging models assume that the forager knows the environment and proceed to predict decision strategies but how does the foraging learn the structure of the environment ? A new preprint delves into this question

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Oh, and thanks to all the people (students, postdocs, and PIs) who took the time to engage with them yesterday and provide feedback and encouragement!

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Zelda and Maud are 3rd and 4th year PhD students. Passionate, hardworking, and fun, they have developed skills in rodent behavior (freely moving foraging), data analysis, and perturbation experiments. They are looking for postdocs. Contact them if interested!

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Complementary contributions of dorsal and ventral striatum to cost-benefit vigor adaptations

Zelda presented the work she has been doing in collaboration with Thomas Morvan on the complementary motivational functions of the dorsal and ventral striatum in rats performing an effort-based foraging task. You can check out the latest preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Humans and other animals adjust when and how fast they execute goal-directed actions according to expected costs and benefits. Yet, the behavioral principles and brain regions underlying adaptive vigo...

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The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice

@maudschaffh.bsky.social presented work on how unilateral perturbation of dSPN/iSPN affects the behavior of mice engaged in a novel foraging task with a lateralized procedural component. The work is based on a cool patch foraging task we just published. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

cell.com

Biological sciences; Behavioral neuroscience; Laboratory animal science

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Ahmed El Hady @zamakany.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Zelda Timmel and Maud Schaffhauser @maudschaffh.bsky.social, 2 outstanding PhD students I am lucky to work with, had a blast yesterday at #FENS presenting their poster on the role of the striatum in decision making and motor control during foraging.

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Reposted by David Robbe

Check this exciting new foraging paper. Very excited that we are currently collaborating with @davidrobbe.bsky.social group to model behavioral mechanisms underlying foraging startegies in the The Tower Foraging Park.

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David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Merci Jérémie ! En effet, le comportement dans cette tache est vraiment sympa et il y plein de cool experiences+ modelisation à faire ...

by the way @maudschaffh.bsky.social will present another story on the role of dorsal striatum using this task at FENS. She is looking for postdoc and will have a poster Thursday afternoon (PS06-09PM-627)

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Hardware, codes, and data are openly available. We hope the TFP becomes a useful platform for others studying decision-making, motor learning/control, motivation. With @aquineuro.bsky.social we are working to provide a fully functional set-up. Get in touch!

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Thanks to @zamakany.bsky.social for suggesting the name of the task and @smondoloni.bsky.social for the nice artwork in the graphical abstract!

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Huge thanks to @maudschaffh.bsky.social , Tom Orjollet-Lacomme, Kenza Amroune, and Thomas Morvan, four amazing PhD students (2 former, 2 current) who each brought distinct, complementary contributions and agreed to share first authorship. This project started in 2020!!

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This paper also makes a broader argument: patch foraging in freely moving animals can provide an intermediate between trial-based tasks (with their pros and cons) and more naturalistic approaches that lack the experimental perturbations necessary to understand the logic of adaptive behavior.

Finally, both groups faced a harder challenge: after leaving a tower, the next rewarded tower and direction were picked at random. Mice previously trained on daily reversals outperformed those trained on a fixed rule, suggesting the reversal training made them more adaptive when foraging is harder.

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Protocol 2 (n=32 mice): rewarded direction switched every day. Each morning mice started by testing the previous day's direction before switching, and across days they got progressively faster at adapting, a form of meta-learning. Uncoupling of speed and trajectory variance adaptation

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After 6 days, the rewarded direction was reversed. Mice persisted briefly in the now unrewarded direction, then adapted. Strikingly, turn trajectory variability was immediately increased by unrewarded outcome while speed remained fast, revealing unexpected uncoupling of these 2 parameters

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Protocol 1 (n=19 mice): only one turning direction rewarded, abrupt depletion, two 12-min sessions/day. Mice developed a strong directional preference within just a few sessions, and only rewarded turns got progressively faster and less variable in trajectory.

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In the Tower Foraging Park (TFP), mice harvest water by making quarter-turns around towers. Each tower eventually depletes, so mice must decide when to leave and explore another, the classic explore/exploit dilemma. Here, we ran two main protocols, adding a procedural learning/flexibility twist

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The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice

Excited to share our new paper: "The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice,". Out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social 🧵1/9 www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

cell.com

Biological sciences; Behavioral neuroscience; Laboratory animal science

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Reposted by David Robbe

Matteo Carandini @carandinilab.net · 01/06/2026

Neuropixels + Optogenetics = Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics. 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors. Today in @natmethods.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social, @alleninstitute.org, @hhmijanelia.bsky.social & team.

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David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Just seeing this! We should have you come give a talk in Marseille. How long will you be around ? Many people with interest in motor control, evo/devo, spinal/cord .....plus the 🌊 and the 🌞

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David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

I am not even sure that clocks count. As you said, clocks just generate a regular movement. We use clock to read and measure time. Or am I wrong?

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

This will never cease to astonish me. Not only the nonsense of the request, but also the time pressure. Does this strategy work? Do people really send preprints to these journals?

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David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Sensorimotor organoids....🤔 what a nice oxymoron. Do they form internal models ?

Current Biology @currentbiology.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Reposted by David Robbe

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL OF YOU!🎄✨

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David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Looks like a very exciting study! Congrats Guiseppe and all collaborators!

Andrew Pruszynski @andpru.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Reposted by David Robbe

Peer review is important and useful but we should focus our efforts on a small number of papers that matter (making big claims, using new approaches) and let the vast majority of work live on a preprint server to be judged by their utility over time to domain experts.

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I am neuroscientist Nicole. I trained with Gyorgy Buzsaki. I learned with him than when two things change together this does not necessarily mean that one causes the other. We're not discussing nonmaterial souls. Things are just a bit more complicated than that 😉

And don't get me wrong: I am fascinating by the brain too. I am just skeptic of where this kind of approach is leading us. Let see where this ship goes (the captain is definitely amazing), without neglecting alternative routes .....

Neuroscience seems stuck with very old-fashioned reductionist/materialist ideas whose shortcomings have already been exposed. More electrodes, more AI… it all sounds like "une fuite en avant" to me.

To me, what is thrilling (and a bit scary too) is to be in an era in which we might be so wrong about our understanding of the relationship between brain and behavior/cognition. I just don't see how the idea that the brain generates consciousness or perception can lead to falsifiable experiments.

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Congrats Juan! So well-deserved !

😂 very generous of you 😂

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I am hesitating to say this is also true of men who think critically. Thank God there are few of them.

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Reposted by David Robbe

“Women who think critically are always labeled difficult because it saves the world from admitting they’re right” — bell hooks Repost of Charmaine Simpson, on LinkendIN: www.linkedin.com/posts/blackh...

Picture accompanying a post from Linked in by Charmaine Simpson

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/blackhistorystudies_bell-hooks-understood-a-pattern-that-repeats-activity-7403886502771888128-CJiy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAFk0BcBSukv5EZ8IStyE-ugz6Io2JLp0iQ

"bell hooks understood a pattern that repeats across generations. When a woman thinks
critically, people often label her difficult before they ever engage with her ideas.
The label is a shortcut.
A way to dismiss her without confronting what she is actually saying.
Critical thinking is powerful because it interrupts comfort. It asks why things are the way they
are. It exposes contradictions that many would rather leave unspoken.
So instead of addressing her insight, the world questions her tone.
It reframes her clarity as attitude.
It turns her precision into a flaw.
But women who think critically are not difficult. They are necessary.
They hold up mirrors that others avoid.
They name truths that would otherwise stay buried.
To think for yourself is not an invitation for conflict. It is an act of presence.
It is choosing awareness over silence.
And every time a woman refuses to apologize for her mind, she shifts the world a little closer to
honesty.

From Her Archives
"

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One of my favorites, I should read it again ...

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I am reading it and and find it HUGELY misguided philosophically speaking. Ideas such as the brain produces consciousness or perception lead only to experimental dead-ends. I don't know if an engineering approach is needed. I'd say we need the opposite. So yeah ...let's see where this goes...

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I wonder whether thinking that animals tend to waste energy (most likely for good reasons) was compatible with this very cartesian rat. This was meant as a friendly joke 😜 . BTW, I entirely agree with your thread , thanks for sharing