Read the story behind Zapit, a random-access optogenetics system developed at SWC in collaboration with the Advanced Microscopy team.

To understand how the brain responds to feedback, researchers set up a perceptual task for participants and used electroencephalography to measure their brain activity related to an area called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is known to be crucial in dynamic environments. The findings from the study provide insights into differences in updating perceptual priors and testing whether reduced error monitoring could act as a reliable biomarker for autism.

New research from the Duan Lab, published as two preprints, shows that mice trained to play a competitive game against an exploitative computer learned to keep their opponent guessing. When a choice was unpredictable, reward signals in the cortex were still present but no longer tied to the next choice. While dopamine tracked reward outcomes to guide learning, norepinephrine signals reflected longer timescale information to shape broader strategy in multi-agent decision contexts.