James Patrick Roach

Our article has been published in Nature Communications! Thank you to the editors, reviewers, and my co-authors @EngelTatiana @anne_churchland for a thoughtful and thorough editorial process. The updated article is available at rdcu.be/c278F

@apocalypsekate We’re awaiting any and all @keithdunn updates #KateMiddleton #kittykontent #BM100

West coast crowd reporting for the night shift of #BM100 #kittykontent

Excited to share our new preprint on how network dynamics and structured connectivity jointly define the spatial and temporal profiles of neural correlations. Work w/ @roxana_zeraati, @SelfOrgAnna, @EngelTatiana: arxiv.org/abs/2207.07930 Here is a #tweeprint:

Our models predict that in different regimes circuits have divergent responses to perturbations of inhibitory neurons: when competitive inhibition dominates suppressing inhibition will slow decisions, whereas decisions will be faster when stabilizing inhibition dominates.

While choice selective inhibition can enhance a competitive or stabilizing role, which of these roles dominates in the circuit is controlled by factors beyond the specificity of inhibitory connections, such as inhibitory tone.

In RNNs trained to perform a decision-making task, connections between choice selective units had the same relationship between the specificity of recurrent excitation and whether selective inhibition was contraspecific or ipsispecific.

In decision-making tasks excitatory and inhibitory neurons show selectively for an upcoming choice. @EngelTatiana, @anne_churchland, and I explore the effects of inhibitory choice selectivity in decision making circuits using mean-field and RNN models. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

The two alternative roles for inhibition—competitive or stabilizing—are apparent in the performance of the circuits. Ipsispecific inhibition leads to slow, accurate decisions while contraspecific inhibition leads to faster decisions at the expense of accuracy.

The specificity of inhibitory connections can compensate for the specificity of excitation: when inhibition is contraspecific, weakly specific excitatory circuits can make decisions and when inhibition is ipsispecific, strongly specific excitatory circuits support decisions.

We constructed circuit models with excitatory and inhibitory populations selective for one of two choices. We connect inhibitory outputs in either contraspecific (across choice) or ipsispecific (within choice) motif.

Excited to share our bioRxiv preprint with @EngelTatiana. Cortical neurons show mixed selectivity for multiple task variables. We develop a latent circuit model for inferring interpretable circuit mechanisms from heterogeneous neural responses. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

It's our 5 month anniversary @dgsomucla! Been a wild & busy time. We got all the setups running; biggest problem is optimizing data management workflows (bless rclone). Movie w/ triple labelling to target inhib neurons by @jpatrickroach & @joaoaocouto w/our new @neurolabware 2p!!

Excited to share our arXiv preprint with @owenkhughes and @EngelTatiana. We develop a framework for inferring non-stationary Langevin dynamics from stochastic observations and test it on spike data generated from decision-making models. Link: arxiv.org/abs/2012.14944

Can we trust interpretation of machine-learning models that are good at predicting data? Our preprint on @biorxiv_neursci shows that good data prediction and accurate interpretation of the model are not the same. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Simplified neural encoding of social communication reflects lifestyle biorxiv.org/content/early/…

Best Game Day Fan Experience • College Football Elite 8 RT ~ Michigan Like ~ Penn State #BracketBattles

I want to hire a #postdoc in the coming months! If you are interested in joining a fantastic and collaborative team to explore the neural circuitry underlying individual differences in motivated behaviors, contact me (sflagel@umich.edu). More info: flagel.lab.medicine.umich.edu/join.html Pls RT!

My latest paper is now available online! Check it out. Resonance with subthreshold oscillatory drive organizes activity and optimizes learning in neural networks pnas.org/content/early/…

#MuppetChristmasCarol is 25 today! To celebrate, I've got my Charles Dickens costume and I'm narrating the lives of random passersby!