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Jes Pass

@jespass.bsky.social
54 followers 66 following 3 posts

Neuroscience postdoc | Combining reinforcement learning and circuit-based neuroscience to understand what learning is

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Reposted by Jes Pass
Andrew MacAskill @macaskillaf.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Congrats @jespass.bsky.social on her new paper! PFC is widely thought to talk to HPC via nucleus reuniens - but no one has tested if this actual connectivity exists. Turns out it's wired to block it: PFC inputs to reuniens contact only neurons projecting back to PFC, not ones projecting to HPC. 🧪🧠📈
biorxiv.org
Nucleus reuniens is organised as parallel circuits rather than a prefrontal-hippocampal relay
Interactions between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and hippocampus (HPC) are crucial for flexible and memory guided behaviour. Because there are no direct projections from PFC to HPC, it is widely presu...
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Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
The difference in utility between the use of ML to tackle big data problems that would otherwise be intractable & the use of LLMs to produce pointless slop is so large they cannot both be usefully described as “AI“. The first is making real progress, the second is dragging us towards the abyss.
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Lorenzo Posani @lorenzoposani.com · 06/08/2026
For a neural circuit to be "specialized", does it need specialized neurons? In our new work - now out in @NatureNeuro - we address this question in the BLA, using representational geometry to propose a new population-centric way of defining circuit specialization. 🧵👇 1/
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bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Predictive abstract task representations support few-shot learning in the rat brain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
1/5 Over a decade of comparing deep neural networks to the human brain—but what have we actually learned? Our new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Feature Review synthesizes a decade of brain–DNN comparisons, asking what they reveal about brain function across vision and language.
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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 17/07/2026
"The propagation of AI slop [...] is making science less trustworthy. But in parallel, AI enthusiasts are telling the world that the remedies should all be easy to automate, creating the impression that journals can not only catch more errors but also do it more efficiently and cheaply."
science.org
AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive
There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Alt...
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Claire L. Evans @theuniverse.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
I was lucky enough to spend a few days at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics recently, observing an interdisciplinary group of scientists as they grappled with the limits of language in the face of biological complexity. My scene report: clairelevans.substack.com/p/report-fro...
clairelevans.substack.com
Report from Goleta
An account of three days haunting the halls of the Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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peterdoohan.bsky.social @peterdoohan.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
How do brains plan actions towards goals? To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵 Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Jes Pass @jespass.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Come hang out with us! :)
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Andrew MacAskill @macaskillaf.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
Huge congrats to @snierwetberg.bsky.social , David (not on BSky), and @maxwellxchen.bsky.social for their paper! They developed a mouse task in which relational structure can be isolated from cue identity and reward statistics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧠📈🧪 #neuroskyence @uclnpp.bsky.social
biorxiv.org
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Jeremiah Cohen @jeremiahycohen.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1
biorxiv.org
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Julie Fabre @juliefabre.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
How do the basal ganglia turn what you see into what you do? New preprint w/ @kenneth-harris.bsky.social, @flickerfusion.bsky.social & @carandinilab.net: we recorded across striatum, GPe & SNr in a Go/NoGo task. Striatum encodes which stimulus, GPe & SNr encode action. 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Gidon Frischkorn @gidon-frischkorn.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
I wrote up something that's been in my head for a while: psychometric methods alone can't tell us what cognitive tasks and their indicators measure. Correlating indicators across tasks is circular when constructs are defined by those same correlations. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵1/3
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Jes Pass @jespass.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Super excited to see the first paper from my PhD out! 🐭 Very satisfying to get to build an interpretable model of how the brain does a thing. A nice palette cleanser in the current sea of LLMs and deep ML.
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Constantinople lab @constantinoplelab.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving
Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...
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Renato Duarte @rcfduarte.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.
open.substack.com
22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience
Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting
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bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Adaptive integration of model-based and model-free strategies in human reinforcement learning of reachable space www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Mark Wagner @mark-j-wagner.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
How does the brain generalize past experiences without confusing memories? 🧠 Our lab's newest preprint reveals a fundamental division of labor between the cortex and cerebellum that solves this problem. (Check out the cortex-cerebellum video below! 👇) 🧵
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Jesse Geerts @jessegeerts.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
🧠 New year, new preprint! Why does motor learning involve multiple brain regions? We propose that the cortico-cerebellar system learns a "map" of actions where similar movements are nearby, while basal ganglia do RL in this simplified space. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Jes Pass @jespass.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Excited to head to CCN @cogcompneuro.bsky.social next week! Come checkout a project I've been working on with @mariaeckstein.bsky.social using interpretable AI to understand flexible behavior in my talk on Thursday morning and poster on Friday evening: 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=A...
2025.ccneuro.org
Poster Presentation
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Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · 20/06/2025
Pleased to share our ICML Spotlight with @eberleoliver.bsky.social, Thomas McGee, Hamza Giaffar, @taylorwwebb.bsky.social. Position: We Need An Algorithmic Understanding of Generative AI What algorithms do LLMs actually learn and use to solve problems?🧵1/n openreview.net/forum?id=eax...
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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
Excited to share this project specifying a research direction I think will be particularly fruitful for theory-driven cognitive science that aims to explain natural behavior! We're calling this direction "Naturalistic Computational Cognitive Science"
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Ian Cone @dr-conehed.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
Our preprint is finally out! How can we understand the role of Behavioral Timescale Synaptic Plasticity in credit assignment? Does it fit into existing supervised and unsupervised learning frameworks? What theoretical gaps are still left unexplained? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Armin Lak @laklab.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
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Andrew MacAskill @macaskillaf.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
Congrats to the fantastic Jess P for her new paper! She compared how feature Vs outcome focussed agents learn to solve contextual inference problems. She found that you need a balance of both to learn these tasks - and that this mix recapitulates pfc and hippocampal activity in rodent tasks!
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