Ilana B. Witten

This paper introduces a framework for multi-view animal pose estimation that improves accuracy and uncertainty estimation with limited labeled data, validated across multiple species.

The paper develops two neural circuit models for evidence accumulation through sequential neuronal activity and tests them against neural recordings from four brain regions during a decision-making task.

The paper identifies cell type-specific transcriptional changes in the VTA of resilient versus susceptible mice subjected to chronic stress, highlighting intercellular signaling and neural communication as key factors in resilience.

This study investigates how VTA dopamine neuron activity shapes stimulus and action value representations in the striatum through conditioned reinforcement in mice.

The paper investigates how THC impairs mouse behavior by altering mPFC excitatory/inhibitory balance through endocannabinoid release.

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.

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.

The paper investigates how direct and indirect basal ganglia pathways influence cortical activity during decision-making, finding that they oppositely modulate a subset of neurons encoding decision variables.

The paper shows that mice with ASD-related mutations exhibit similar computational and neural anomalies in prior updating during decision-making.

This study evaluates the reproducibility of electrophysiological measurements across ten labs using standardized protocols and finds that variability in electrode targeting and statistical methods affects reproducibility.

The paper shows that postingestive malaise signals reactivate amygdala flavor representations, strengthening memory and resolving temporal credit assignment in aversive learning.

This study investigates the roles of central striatum (CS) and anterior lateral motor area (ALM) in initiating and sustaining naturalistic grooming behavior using fiber photometry and optogenetic stimulation in mice.

The paper shows that pre-existing visual responses in dopamine terminals predict individual learning trajectories in mice during a visual task.

The paper shows that heightened lateral habenula activity during stress leads to lasting brainwide and behavioral susceptibility in mice.

The paper introduces a feature-specific reward prediction error model to explain heterogeneity in dopamine neuron responses in the VTA and shows it aligns with neural recordings.

This paper introduces a theory of hippocampal replay that explains how replay builds a cognitive map for navigation, reconciling conflicting hypotheses about its function and predicting new experimental outcomes.

This paper identifies distinct inhibitory circuits in the hypothalamus that separately control the motivational and action phases of aggression in mice.

The paper shows that VTA dopamine neurons respond to both food and social stimuli, with overlapping populations and increased overlap under hunger or social experience.

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

The paper identifies a neural substrate in mice where female-specific modulation of motivation by value is mediated by ACC-DMS neurons.

The paper identifies behavioral and neural signatures of resilience to chronic stress by analyzing dopamine activity and behavior in mice during social defeat.

The paper shows that dorsomedial striatal pathways oppositely control behavior depending on task demands and internal state.

The paper compares cortical and thalamic inputs to the nucleus accumbens in mice during a reinforcement learning task, finding that cortical inputs represent actions and choices while thalamic inputs represent cues, with cortical sequences supporting reinforcement learning.

The paper shows that endogenous acetylcholine signaling in the nucleus accumbens mediates cocaine extinction by modulating synaptic strength similarly across medium spiny neuron subtypes.

The paper validates a spike inference method using calcium imaging in dopamine neurons, showing accurate spike detection in both slice and in vivo settings.

This paper develops a standardized task for measuring decision-making in mice, showing reproducible results across multiple laboratories and providing a public dataset and tools.

The paper compares dopaminergic and cholinergic populations in rats to determine their role in short-term memory, finding that VTA dopamine neurons have a unique causal contribution during the delay period.

The paper shows that medial and lateral VTA dopamine neurons encode distinct signals during fear extinction, with different temporal effects on learning.

The paper investigates how midbrain dopamine neurons encode sensory, motor, and cognitive variables during a complex decision-making task, finding that neurons are functionally and spatially organized into clusters specialized for specific behavioral variables.

The paper investigates whether movement-related activity in dopamine neurons can be explained by reward prediction error (RPE) and finds that choice encoding is distinct from RPE.