Rylan Schaeffer

Age-related changes in behavioural and neural variability in a decision-making task

This study examines age-related changes in neural and behavioural variability during a decision-making task in mice, finding increased neural variability and reduced variability quenching in specific brain regions.

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making

Mice infer stimulus-side priors from recent choices; prior signals are decodable pre-stimulus in 24.0% to 30.2% of 242 brain regions, including early visual and motor areas.

A Brain-Wide Map of Neural Activity during Complex Behaviour

The paper presents a brain-wide neural activity map from 621,733 neurons across 139 mice performing a decision-making task, showing how neural activity encodes task variables across brain regions.

Data architecture for a large-scale neuroscience collaboration

The paper describes a modular data architecture for a neuroscience collaboration, enabling data contribution, access, and analysis across multiple labs.

No Free Lunch from Deep Learning in Neuroscience: A Case Study through Models of the Entorhinal-Hippocampal Circuit

This paper shows that deep learning models of grid cells in the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit do not reliably capture fundamental neural mechanisms and are influenced by non-fundamental implementation choices.

Reverse-engineering Recurrent Neural Network solutions to a hierarchical inference task for mice

This paper studies how RNNs solve a hierarchical inference task with two latent variables and disparate timescales, finding they learn behavior similar to Bayesian baselines and develop interpretable models through knowledge distillation.