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Community Newsletter: Animal modelling, cannabis and autism, a new editor-in-chief | Spectrum

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Illustration by Laurene Boglio

Twitter can feel like a zoo at times, and this week our feeds were wild with excitement at two behavioral modeling studies.

First was a new preprint shared by Benjamin Cowley, a computational neuroscientist at Princeton University, in which he and his colleagues used a deep neural network, or “deep net,” to model a fruit fly’s visual system. “Deep nets are great at predicting visual neurons. Yet they can’t tell us which artificial neuron directly corresponds to a biological neuron… until now!” wrote Cowley.

His results showed “that visual projection neurons at the eye-brain interface form a distributed population code that shapes collective social behavior.”

“Here, biological and artificial knockouts predict neural activity and distributed function in complex brain regions. i’m blinded,” tweeted Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York City.

Dan O’Shea, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, was also enthusiastic about the article, stressing that “it improves the traceability of the fly visual system.”

There were many other tweets we couldn’t share, but they all had one thing in common: great excitement about this work and its implications for the future of neuroscience.

Other flight modeling work also had Twitter buzzing — and this one included mice. The team in question announced the release of a new dataset “from real-world behavioral neuroscience experiments.”

The dataset “consists of mouse (9 mil frames) and fly (4 mil frames) social interactions for studying behavioral representation learning!” tweeted Jennifer Sun, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Ann Kennedy, assistant professor of neuroscience at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, who contributed to the dataset and was featured in a Spectrum profile article this week, shared her excitement in a quote tweet.

This may sound like a far-fetched concept, but going back and forth on Twitter can be peaceful, polite, and productive. As proof, we provide such a conversation sparked by a Twitter user @drdebahassistant professor of psychology at the University of New Orleans in Louisiana, after she tweeted about participating in a survey about cannabis use in autism.

“Really interesting research areabut not a fan of the way some of the ‘demographic’ questions about autism are framed”, Twitter user @science_enby replied.

They delved into a series of tweets, raising issues such as the available series in response to a question when a autism diagnosis has been receivedtweeting, “I’d say there’s a lot more difference between getting a diagnosis at 3 versus 17 than between 75 and 85.”

@science_enby also pointed out issues with the available answers to the survey question and asked respondents about the level of support, tweeting: “It’s really weird to see different autistic traits attributed to different ‘levels of support’.”

“I hear & receive all this feedback!” replied @drdebah, who replied with explanations, but also promised to solve some problems and clarify others in any descriptions of the study.

“Thanks for the responses! I definitely appreciate the difficulty of turning turning complex experiences into analysable variables,” tweeted @science_enby in a final response.

Finally, the Society for Neuroscience announced the appointment of Sabine Kastner as the next editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Princeton Neuroscience Institute called the appointment “fantastic news for Sabine and the field!” in a quote tweet.

In response, Nicole C. Rust, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, called Kastner a “excellent choice.”

That’s it for this week’s Community Newsletter! If you have suggestions for interesting social posts you’ve seen in the field of autism research, feel free to email [email protected].

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Cite this article: https://doi.org/10.53053/RXHV2963