Serena Riccitelli

First preprint from the lab! Using intracellular recordings & analysis of 2-photon imaging data, we show that spiking & neuromodulatory input during experience drive a reorganization of visuomotor inputs in V1 layer 2/3 neurons, consistent with enhanced visuomotor cancellation - bioRxiv link below.

Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social!

A dive into the deep history of vertebrate vision, together with @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social

Photo credit : Vasilis Karkalas

Donate to In Memory of Adam: His Legacy of Education for Everyone, organized by Elena Dreosti Adam’s greatest loves were his ideas, his work, and our two chil… Elena Dreosti needs your support for In Memory of Adam: His Legacy of Education for Everyone

Hi everyone, we would like to invite you to follow @noblackboxes.bsky.social and share with anyone who believes that explaining and understanding technology is essential for scientists. You can also donate to support the No Black Boxes foundation.

Retinal processing of natural scenes: challenges ahead While substantial knowledge exists about the way the retina processes simple stimuli, our understanding of how the retina processes natural stimuli re…

How does our visual system process natural scenes ? How can we approach this question ?
Happy to share this recent review written with Samuele Virgili where we ask these questions at the level of the retina.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Cool work by Lu! Dissociating "context frames" from categorical/perceptual similarity and finding unique "context" signatures in LOC/PPA.

Decoupling of visual feature selectivity in the retinocollicular pathway Schwartz and Matsumoto et al. show that visual feature selectivity for luminance and motion is coupled in the retina but becomes decoupled in the superior colliculus. This transformation reorganizes t...

Excited to share our new work on visual information processing in the retinocollicular pathway. We discovered that while luminance responses can predict motion responses in retinal ganglion cells, this prediction does not hold in the superior colliculus cells.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

🚨 New paper out by Granados-Martínez et al. "Poison #frogs rely on vision for #homing in natural environments" 🐸👀🌳 @royalsocietypublishing.org
Check it out: ↘️ doi.org/10.1098/rspb... ↙️ #Navigation #Dendrobatidae #SpatialEcology

Social attraction mediates collective foraging decisions in invasive hornets Group-living animals commonly use social information to better locate and exploit resources. In many insects, birds, fish and mammals, this can lead to collective foraging decisions by which animals s...

In social animals, the choose of foraging sites can be biased by social cues of conspecifics. This preprint shows that the presence of hornets on food sources attracts conspecifics or other closely related hornets.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The inflammatory reflex shows how the brain regulates immunity through the vagus nerve: signals reach the spleen, activate T cells, and release acetylcholine to reduce TNF-α.

Inflammation isn’t only chemical, it’s electrical, with the brain telling the immune system when to calm down (James Durham)

Retinal glia regulate development of the circadian photoentrainment circuit Circadian photoentrainment depends on intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), which convey environmental light information to th…

Our latest paper is out! While the circadian photoentrainment circuit has been extensively studied, the mechanisms regulating its development remain poorly understood. Here we show that retinal Müller glia play a key role in this process. Check it out! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Visual motion and landmark position align with heading direction in the zebrafish interpeduncular nucleus - Nature Communications How are various visual signals integrated in the vertebrate brain for navigation? Here authors show that different spatial signals are topographically organized and align to one another in the zebrafi...

(1/n) We are excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications, by Hagar Lavian (@hlavian.bsky.social) and team, revealing how the zebrafish brain integrates visual navigation signals! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Effects of eye closure on the spiking activity of human lateral geniculate neurons - Nature Communications The LGN is a critical stage between the retina and visual cortex, but the properties of human LGN neurons are not fully understood. Here the authors report that they closely resemble those in monkeys ...

Our paper showing the first ever recordings of spiking activity from neurons in the human lateral geniculate nucleus has just been published in Nature Communications! Congrats to the whole team. #neuroskyence @nin-knaw.bsky.social @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A global screen for magnetically induced neuronal activity in the pigeon brain How animals detect the Earth’s magnetic field remains a mystery in sensory biology. Despite extensive behavioral evidence, the neural circuitry and molecular mechanisms responsible for magnetic sensin...

The magentic sense is undoubtedly one of the greatest secrets in sensory biology. Whole brain activity mapping in response to 🧲 stimulation revealed a light-independent activity in the medial vestibular nuclei & the caudal mesopallium in the pigeon 🧠
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified ...

🚨New Preprint!
How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715

+ @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social
🧵 1/14

Excellent work @victorcalbiagueg.bsky.social !!!

Functional specialisation of multisensory temporal integration in the mouse superior colliculus - Nature Communications Whether and how anatomically distinct regions of the superior colliculus (SC) exhibit specialisation in multisensory temporal integration to facilitate different behavioural responses are not fully un...

Proud to have contributed to @gaiabianchini.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social new paper on how the superior colliculus temporally integrates multisensory information

a must read for anyone interested visual cortex plasticity - a fresh look at some textbook models and a fun read. congratulations to the authors!

Macaque IT neurons may shift from low to high spatial frequencies over time, supporting a coarse-to-fine view of vision. Evidence is incomplete, but the study offers clues to how spatial frequency links to category signals in object recognition.
buff.ly/Lv3CQmq

The origins of hallucinations are traced in specialized brain cells Researchers used lasers to record and stimulate the activity of neurons in mice to learn how the brain processes and interprets optical illusions.

Why do optical illusions work? The culprit may be a group of neurons in the visual cortex that help us fill in missing information.

@markjohnpost.bsky.social for @washingtonpost.com dives into the science and how it could help demystify visual hallucinations: www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

The 2025 volume of the Annual Review of Vision Science is now online. The most read article so far is "Behavior-Specific Computations in the Vertebrate Retina" arevie.ws/46HMEjd @serenariccitelli.bsky.social @annaintegrated.bsky.social @katrinfranke.bsky.social

TOC: arevie.ws/3Wklava

Learned precision tool use in carrion crows Moll et al. show that carrion crows—which do not habitually use tools in the wild—can be trained to use a stick tool as an extension of their body. Trained crows flexibly adjust tool orientation and d...

Some animals are able to use objects in their environment as tools, like 🐒, 🦜 and corvids. In this new report from the Nieder lab, they show that carrions crows, with no tool-use adaptations are able to use a stick as a tool and refine their precision through learning! 🐦‍⬛ www.cell.com/current-biol...

a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out . ALT: a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out .

👁️The retina — strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians!

So how did it evolve?

With @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social, we argue that retinal complexity may 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n

A new look at the pupil: more than just a gatekeeper | EMBL New research from the Rompani and Asari groups at EMBL Rome suggests that the pupil does more than just respond to light and internal states — it may actively shape our vision.

Our EMBL Press office has a nice little article on our recent paper on how the pupil's dynamics shape visual responses in the mouse and human.

A new look at the pupil: more than just a gatekeeper www.embl.org/news/science...

Seeing the world through the lens of oscillations - we are delighted to share our new paper where we demonstrate that anatomically resolved oscillatory bursts reveal dynamic motifs of thalamocortical activity during naturalistic stimulus viewing (doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...).

Excellent end to the Italian Congress for Neuroscience (SINS) - our postdoc Lucia Zanetti chairing a fascinating session on the retina & beyond together with @serenariccitelli.bsky.social! Well done & thanks to the speakers Stefano Di Marco, @santiagorompani.bsky.social, Norma Kühn & Max Joesch

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today!

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A hypothalamic circuit that modulates feeding and parenting behaviours - Nature Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of mouse hypothalamus and behavioural experiments show that specific hypothalamic networks regulate conflicting feeding versus parenting behaviours of female mice.

How do animals decide if they should forage for food or stay home to take care of newborn offspring? Whose needs come first? For my PhD work now out in Nature, we examined how hunger and parenting neurons interact and are reshaped postpartum in mice 🧵⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Barcoded Rabies In Situ Connectomics for high-throughput reconstruction of neural circuits Sequencing of oligonucleotide barcodes holds promise as a high-throughput approach for reconstructing synaptic connectivity at scale. Rabies viruses can act as a vehicle for barcode transmission, than...

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Large-scale high-density brain-wide neural recording in nonhuman primates - Nature Neuroscience Neuropixels 1.0 NHP is a 45-mm, high-density silicon probe capable of recording large numbers of neurons with single-neuron resolution from most areas in a macaque’s brain.

Our paper on NHP neuropixels is finally out in Nat Neuro! These probes have already been transformative and will usher in a new era of primate neuroscience. I am extremely proud to have played a very small role in this project. I can't wait to see what our community discovers. tinyurl.com/54u3hrj8

Come to Genova in October, 2-day Workshop on Social Behavior and its Dysfunctions. FREE registration, info in the attached Flyer: