Dimitra Maoutsa
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dimma.bsky.social
Dimitra Maoutsa
@dimma.bsky.social
Theor/Comp Neuroscientist (postdoc)
Prev @TU Munich
Stochastic&nonlin. dynamics @TU Berlin&@MPIDS

Learning dynamics, plasticity&geometry of representations
https://dimitra-maoutsa.github.io
https://dimitra-maoutsa.github.io/M-Dims-Blog
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
I might be misremembering, but I think the ideas were known a few years before the 2017 preprint because of their 2014 COSYNE presentation.
ganguli-gang.stanford.edu/pdf/14.Cosyn...
ganguli-gang.stanford.edu
November 24, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Nature research paper: Integrator dynamics in the cortico-basal ganglia loop for flexible motor timing

go.nature.com/4oX2rmq
Integrator dynamics in the cortico-basal ganglia loop for flexible motor timing - Nature
How the mouse frontal cortex and striatum interact to implement integrator dynamics controlling movement timing is explored.
go.nature.com
November 24, 2025 at 9:19 AM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
In fact, in some recent work, we showed that transiently blocking some proprioceptive feedback *increases* the dimensionality of dynamics along a direction orthogonal to the task manifold, with only *weak* effects on behavioral trajectories.
Motor Cortical Output Integrates Distorted Proprioceptive Feedback
Proprioceptive feedback from muscles is essential for continuous monitoring and precise control of limb movement, yet how such peripheral feedback is integrated into ongoing descending motor cortical ...
www.biorxiv.org
November 24, 2025 at 1:16 AM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Not directly related to @neurograce.bsky.social’s comment here but to the thread: I am baffled by the number of people who seem to think the claim is that all brain computation is low-d vs. the *emprical* finding that task-related neural activity is (linear) low-d in many (not all) cases.
This kind of stuff is why I say that I worry that the tools of neuroscience are not properly vetted
“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”
November 24, 2025 at 1:16 AM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Cheetahs continue to be scary predators.
November 21, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
"We thank the reviewers for their helpful suggestions"
November 23, 2025 at 11:19 AM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗹𝗲𝘅𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲
𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀
"...trade-off between cognitive flexibility and stability inherent to dynamical system models of varying complexity."
by S Musslick and A Bizyaeva
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
November 22, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Important reminder that we can continue to do better to make academia a safe & decent place for all. 💜
November 23, 2025 at 12:56 AM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
I guess for some people, junior scientists are like eggs. If you have a dozen, you can break most of them because you only need a couple to produce an omelet.
November 17, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Reviewer asking the authors to add 10 references from their lab
November 22, 2025 at 4:28 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Seals singing in a sea cave

#Orkney 🦭🎧
November 21, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Former Finnish PM Sanna Marin put it bluntly: “To end the conflict, Russia must leave Ukrainian territory.”

Just one point. Nothing more to discuss.
November 21, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
What happens if you hook up an energy-efficiency optimising RNN on active vision input?

It learns predictive remapping and path integration into allocentric scene coordinates.

Now out in patterns: www.cell.com/patterns/ful...
November 21, 2025 at 8:01 AM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
In case anyone wonders how things are going in The Other Place
November 20, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Putting the figures at the end of your preprint is one thing, but separating the CAPTIONS from the figures (with both at the end of the paper) is just plain cruel
November 18, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
whenever the sun sets at 4:45 pm i open a window, lean out and yell "WRONG" as loud as i can. that usually buys me another hour or two of sunlight
November 17, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
#SfN25 Mini-symposium: Today at 2:00 pm PST | No Central Executive? Decision Formation Through Multi-Area Population Dynamics
Read the accompanying article by Chandrasekaran et al. in #JNeurosci
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1633-25.2025
November 17, 2025 at 9:00 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
paper🚨
When we learn a category, do we learn the structure of the world, or just where to draw the line? In a cross-species study, we show that humans, rats & mice adapt optimally to changing sensory statistics, yet rely on fundamentally different learning algorithms.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Different learning algorithms achieve shared optimal outcomes in humans, rats, and mice
Animals must exploit environmental regularities to make adaptive decisions, yet the learning algorithms that enabels this flexibility remain unclear. A central question across neuroscience, cognitive science, and machine learning, is whether learning relies on generative or discriminative strategies. Generative learners build internal models the sensory world itself, capturing its statistical structure; discriminative learners map stimuli directly onto choices, ignoring input statistics. These strategies rely on fundamentally different internal representations and entail distinct computational trade-offs: generative learning supports flexible generalisation and transfer, whereas discriminative learning is efficient but task-specific. We compared humans, rats, and mice performing the same auditory categorisation task, where category boundaries and rewards were fixed but sensory statistics varied. All species adapted their behaviour near-optimally, consistent with a normative observer constrained by sensory and decision noise. Yet their underlying algorithms diverged: humans predominantly relied on generative representations, mice on discriminative boundary-tracking, and rats spanned both regimes. Crucially, end-point performance concealed these differences, only learning trajectories and trial-to-trial updates revealed the divergence. These results show that similar near-optimal behaviour can mask fundamentally different internal representations, establishing a comparative framework for uncovering the hidden strategies that support statistical learning. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Wellcome Trust, https://ror.org/029chgv08, 219880/Z/19/Z, 225438/Z/22/Z, 219627/Z/19/Z Gatsby Charitable Foundation, GAT3755 UK Research and Innovation, https://ror.org/001aqnf71, EP/Z000599/1
www.biorxiv.org
November 17, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success
November 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
come check out this #SfN25 minisymposium happening today at 2pm!

we will discuss recent approaches to make sense of multi-area population dynamics

www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...
November 17, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
There’s a really obvious recurrent pattern where these fucking dudes have power and that’s the status quo and they use that power to ensure that people objecting to their behavior are the ones disrupting the status quo, and are therefore seen as the troublemakers
November 17, 2025 at 5:47 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
This short thread by @chanda.blacksky.app is very much worth a read, especially in light of learning once again that high-status political and academic men (eg Larry Summers) can be dangerous pigs and that it’s a constant professional BURDEN to women in the same field, especially women of color. ⬇️
Bsky hasn’t heard the story about the time that I was giving a virtual colloquium to the Aspen Center for Physics in September 2020 and Lawrence Krauss, Geoff Marcy, Christian Ott all attended as a group

ACP now has a policy that would prevent this from happening, because of that incident 🔭
November 17, 2025 at 5:38 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
In a short piece for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, @abeba.bsky.social and I write #AIHype Is Steering EU Policy Off Course.

Stop peddling in unscientific discourse about “AGI” and “superintelligence.” Serve citizens. Don't cater to the whims of tech CEOs.

www.techpolicy.press/ai-hype-is-s...
AI Hype Is Steering EU Policy Off Course | TechPolicy.Press
Kris Shrishak and Abeba Birhane say policymakers should stop peddling in unscientific discourse about "AGI" and "superintelligence."
www.techpolicy.press
November 17, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Excited to be at #SfN25! Come catch my poster “Neural dimensionality expands over the course of brain-computer interface learning” wed PM (W15) if you’re interested in non-invasive BCIs, neural manifolds, human learning, etc. Building upon our recent work (doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.29.646109)
Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore and enhance a wide range of human capabilities. However, a barrier to the adoption of BCIs is how long it can take users to learn to control them. W...
www.biorxiv.org
November 16, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Dimitra Maoutsa
Sexual harassment is a productivity tax on women in STEM
Imagine the things we could do with our time if we didn’t have to do this bsky.app/profile/chan...
I did my job. And then I did a job that never should have been my responsibility afterwards, sending emails and having meetings about how this was allowed to happen in the first place. Other women scholars had to spend their time explaining to Aspen leadership why this was not ok.
November 16, 2025 at 7:35 PM