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Saskia de Vries

@sejdevries.bsky.social

3.4K followers 1.2K following 94 posts

🏳️‍🌈🧠🔬🚴‍♀️ Neuroscientist. Director of Data and Outreach at Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics. Focused on how we do Science in the Open. She/her.

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Saskia de Vries @sejdevries.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

We said goodbye to our sweet pup Hobbes yesterday. We miss him so much.

A very loved dog being held by his moms on his last adventure to the beach.

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Saskia de Vries @sejdevries.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

If saccades responses were primarily visually driven, we’d expect that saccade responsive neurons would have distinct visual responses from non-saccade responsive neurons. We did not find this when comparing things like direction selectivity, lifetime sparseness, etc.

Four figures comparing visual response metrics across different populations of neurons, that are all nearly identical

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Saskia de Vries @sejdevries.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

Perhaps the most surprising thing we found was that there are nearly 5X more neurons that respond to temporal saccades than to nasal saccades. This seems really interesting to us, and we think it’s related to orienting behaviors of the mouse, but we don’t know.

Figure showing the distribution of direction selectivity index with nasal preferring in blue and temporal preferring in red. Many more neurons in the red than the blue

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Saskia de Vries @sejdevries.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

9% of neurons in this dataset had significant responses to saccades. Most show enhanced responses, some are suppressed after saccades, and many are direction selective, responding only when the saccade is in the temporal or the nasal direction, but not both.

Figure showing an example neurons response to saccades in both nasal and temporal directions where the nasal response is much larger than the temporal.

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Saskia de Vries @sejdevries.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

We analyzed over 800 experiment sessions from this dataset from over 200 mice and identified saccades from the eye position traces. We had expected to find that mice made more saccades during some visual stimuli than others, but this was not the case.

Colorful data showing mean saccade frequency as a function of stimulus type with similar distributions for all stimuli

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Saskia de Vries @sejdevries.bsky.social · 03/09/2023

The Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain has wrapped up. A wonderful two weeks of computational #neuroscience with open data!

A group of students and instructors on a deck in the sun, smiling because we just finished the final student project presentations.

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Saskia de Vries @sejdevries.bsky.social · 21/08/2023

Excited to be heading up to Friday Harbor for our annual Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain. It’s a little smokey, but should clear up soon. Looking forward to working with students on some exciting science! #neuroscience

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