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Jonathan Tsay

@tsay

Assistant Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University | Studying how we acquire, adapt, and retain skilled movements | Physical Intelligence Lab: www.tsaylab.com

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28.09.2023
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Latest posts by Jonathan Tsay @tsay

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Public communication alters private confidence Andreassen et al. demonstrate that confidence exhibited in public affects our private assessment of confidence.

How does uncertainty transmit from one head to another? Our new paper out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social reveals how public communication alters private confidence.

w/ Einar Andreassen & @cdfrith.bsky.social

@birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social
@leverhulme.ac.uk

πŸ§ πŸ“ˆ

09.03.2026 16:20 πŸ‘ 54 πŸ” 21 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Congratulations @actlab.bsky.social on your Young Investigator Award! Join us now for his #CNS2026 award talk, about generalized prediction errors in the human cerebellum a d the motor system, with an intro by @hartleylabnyu.bsky.social

09.03.2026 21:07 πŸ‘ 37 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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New study shows how sickle cell affects brain function New research from the Wood Neuro Research Group suggests sickle cell disease changes how the brain’s networks work together, with the brain calling on extra support from attention systems to keep thin...

New research from the Wood Neuro Research Group suggests sickle cell disease changes how the brain’s networks work together, with the brain calling on extra support from attention systems to keep thinking and decision-making on track.

www.cmu.edu/ni/news-even...

09.03.2026 15:35 πŸ‘ 11 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1
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Using Quarto to Write a Book I’ve spent the last couple of months revising my Data Visualization book for a second edition that, ideally, will appear some time in the next twelve months. As with the first edition, I’ve posted a c...

Using Quarto to write (and typeset) a book.

09.03.2026 20:29 πŸ‘ 179 πŸ” 48 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 2

We've been saying for a while now that beta bursts might be functionally heterogeneous. Check out @quentinmoreau.bsky.social's paper where we show that different types of bursts have different relationships to behavior in a sensorimotor adaptation task πŸ‘‡πŸ‘‡πŸ‘‡

09.03.2026 07:07 πŸ‘ 14 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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I will be at #cosyne2026 next week presenting some new work on "Simultaneous sensorimotor and contextual inference"

www.cosyne.org/poster-sessi...

Looking forward to seeing many familiar and new faces in Lisbon!

08.03.2026 21:15 πŸ‘ 11 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Longer dive into the data, meaning, and consequences

substack.com/home/post/p-...

08.03.2026 21:11 πŸ‘ 20 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 2
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Saurabh Vyas Thinks Through Neuroscience Research Saurabh Vyas Thinks Through Neuroscience Research

β€œI want to study how the brain takes knowledge about some topic then applies it to solve a totally new problem...”

tinyurl.com/ynvyv685

02.03.2026 16:26 πŸ‘ 13 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

RIP redundancy reduction?

Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

07.03.2026 11:08 πŸ‘ 68 πŸ” 25 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1
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Humans can learn bimodal priors in complex sensorimotor behaviour #ProcB #Neuroscience #Cognition royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

05.03.2026 13:57 πŸ‘ 17 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 3
Evolution of object identity information in sensorimotor cortex throughout grasp - Nature Communications How the brain maintains object representations during grasping, when complex sensory input rapidly changes, remains poorly understood. Here the authors show that object-identity signals shift and stre...

New paper out in Nature Communications about how object identity information evolves across sensorimotor cortex through grasp β€” and I am really happy with how it turned out. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

05.03.2026 16:34 πŸ‘ 13 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my β€œData Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

05.03.2026 22:54 πŸ‘ 544 πŸ” 174 πŸ’¬ 13 πŸ“Œ 15
A quote by H. Holden Thorp, Editor-in-chief of Science journals, on a black background. The quote is: "… why curtail a program … that cultivates and grows the number of US graduate students and future researchers?"

A quote by H. Holden Thorp, Editor-in-chief of Science journals, on a black background. The quote is: "… why curtail a program … that cultivates and grows the number of US graduate students and future researchers?"

"There is perhaps no stronger evidence of the [Trump] administration’s objectives to reduce the quality of the US scientific workforce than its treatment of the [NSF]’s flagship Graduate Research Fellowship Program," writes H. Holden Thorp in a new #ScienceEditorial. https://scim.ag/4d0fi3N

05.03.2026 20:11 πŸ‘ 44 πŸ” 19 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Vision Fine‐Tunes Predictions of Bimanual Self‐Touch When we move to touch ourselves, our somatosensory perception is gradually attenuated due to the predictions of the internal forward models about the somatosensory consequences of our movements. Here...

Happy to share that our new paper has been published in the European Journal of Neuroscience (@ejneuroscience.bsky.social)! Using psychophysics, we show that vision fine-tunes self-touch predictions, leading to the temporal modulation of somatosensory perception during movements to self-touch.

24.02.2026 09:26 πŸ‘ 8 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 2
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How does the brain generalize past experiences without confusing memories? 🧠

Our lab's newest preprint reveals a fundamental division of labor between the cortex and cerebellum that solves this problem. (Check out the cortex-cerebellum video below! πŸ‘‡) 🧡

05.03.2026 10:45 πŸ‘ 65 πŸ” 19 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 5
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The molecular basis of force selectivity by PIEZO2 Nature - PIEZO2 is intrinsically more rigid than PIEZO1, and disparate mechanical stimuli paradoxically evoke opposite conformational and gating responses in each channel.

New paper from the lab led by @ericmulhall.bsky.social addresses how PIEZO1 and PIEZO2 are tuned to different types mechanical forces. From nanometer-scale super-resolution microscopy to in vivo experiments, links single-molecule observations to physiological function.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

04.03.2026 17:19 πŸ‘ 125 πŸ” 37 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 2

How does the algorithmic implementation of sensorimotor integration change during development and in disease?
New paper from the Bahl lab🐟:
Developmental and genetic modulation of evidence integration dynamics in zebrafish sensorimotor decision-making
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

04.03.2026 11:46 πŸ‘ 9 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science πŸ“•πŸ‘‡

Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic!

Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!

12.02.2026 22:22 πŸ‘ 52 πŸ” 22 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1
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Can we use robotic augmentation limbs as flexibly as our natural limbs⁉️

🧨 Our new study, just out in @currentbiology.bsky.social, tested this using the Third Thumb @daniclode.bsky.social: a wearable robotic
extra thumb you control with your toes!

www.cell.com/current-biol... ‼️‼️

02.03.2026 12:36 πŸ‘ 19 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

Deadline is Friday! If you've been on the fence about BAMB! 2026 β€” jump. It's one of the best summer schools for behavioral & computational modeling out there, and I'd know πŸ˜„
Apply β†’ bambschool.org
#Neuroscience #CogSci #ComputationalNeuroscience #SummerSchool #AcademicBsky

03.03.2026 17:14 πŸ‘ 8 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Konstantina Kilteni (@kkilteni.bsky.social) Assistant Professor and PI at Donders and Karolinska Institutes, leading the Somatosensation&Gargalesis lab (a.k.a Touch&Tickle lab). I study actions, touch, and tickles 🧠 (https://www.kiltenilab.org...

Later in the movement, global suppression attenuates and surrounding regions (e.g., the forearm) rebound to normal sensitivity.

At the same time, suppression localizes to the expected point of self-touch, reflecting a prediction of the impending contact at the fingertip (kkilteni.bsky.social)

03.03.2026 23:51 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Interesting to think about whether these two effects could be reconciled by effects at two-different scales:

Early in the movement, sensory processing may be globally suppressed in the moved limb (fatatai.bsky.social)....

03.03.2026 23:51 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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The extraordinary enigma of ordinary tickle behavior: Why gargalesis still puzzles neuroscience Tickle sensation remains one of the biggest unresolved mysteries in neuroscienceβ€”one that scientists are only beginning to unravel.

New article out at Science Advances!

Three challenges, five questions, and multiple implications of tickle.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

@dondersinst.bsky.social @ki.se @erc.europa.eu
#neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor #ERCResearch #ticklelab

26.05.2025 14:18 πŸ‘ 42 πŸ” 18 πŸ’¬ 6 πŸ“Œ 2
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Why is touch perceived as weaker during movement?

In our new preprint πŸ“, we examine tactile suppression during reaching.

Using optimal control theory, we show that tactile suppression reflects dynamic, uncertainty-dependent integration of forward model predictions and sensory feedback.

27.02.2026 10:57 πŸ‘ 36 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 3
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The secret of squeaky basketball shoes When shoes slide across a floor, wave-like deformations of the sole can generate squeaking. The pitch of the squeak depends on the rate at which deformations are generated.

When shoes slide across a floor, wave-like deformations of the sole can generate squeaking

go.nature.com/4saI6Lp

03.03.2026 10:04 πŸ‘ 64 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 4
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The human body is remarkably adaptable, capable of integrating artificial enhancements from tools to prosthetic limbs.

Researchers have used finger extensions to test how the brain updates its expectations over time.

πŸ”— buff.ly/HxxCzTz

24.02.2026 21:02 πŸ‘ 14 πŸ” 7 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

Why are tactile sensations suppressed during movements? In our new preprint, we explain this as optimal integration of sensory signals with an internal model.

Work led by @fatatai.bsky.social with Dimitris Voudouris, Katja Fiehler and @c-rothkopf.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

27.02.2026 11:37 πŸ‘ 38 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

Awesome to see this work published, Marius. Congrats.

25.02.2026 01:45 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Precision of reaches and proprioception in motor control and adaptation - Discover Neuroscience How do precision of movement and proprioception influence motor control and adaptation? Several theoriesβ€”such as the exploration-exploitation hypothesisβ€”propose that variability plays a key role in mo...

1/8 Paper! Using previously published data from 270 participants, we look at precision of reaches and hand proprioception in rotation adaptation:
doi.org/10.1186/s130...

24.02.2026 02:10 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Accepted to #CVPR2026 πŸ™ŒπŸ”₯

23.02.2026 12:57 πŸ‘ 22 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0