Jonathan Tsay

Humans can learn bimodal priors in complex sensorimotor behaviour #ProcB #Neuroscience #Cognition royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

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

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

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

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

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.

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! 👇) 🧵

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...

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...

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇

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!

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... ‼️‼️

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

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)

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)....

The extraordinary enigma of ordinary tickle behavior: Why gargalesis still puzzles neuroscience Tickle sensation remains one of the biggest unresolved mysteries in neuroscience—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

Why is touch perceived as weaker during movement?

In our new preprint 📝, 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.

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

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.

🔗 buff.ly/HxxCzTz

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...

Awesome to see this work published, Marius. Congrats.

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 theories—such as the exploration-exploitation hypothesis—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...

Accepted to #CVPR2026 🙌🔥

Sensorimotor Adaptation to a Nonuniform Formant Perturbation Is Preserved in Healthy Aging Purpose: Young adult speakers can be induced to increase the acoustic contrast between vowels through exposure to a nonuniform auditory “centrali...

Sensorimotor Adaptation to a Nonuniform Formant Perturbation Is Preserved in Healthy Aging pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/... Examined effects of healthy aging on the magnitude of both adaptation to vowel centralisation smooshing (vowel distinction⬇️)& generalisation of this learning to untrained vowels

I reviewed 5+ fMRI papers on response inhibition within roughly the last year, and the same points come up over and over again. So I wrote a short note last week entitled "The unique limitations of BOLD-fMRI in the study of response inhibition". You can read it here.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out https://superlab.ca/posts/2026-02-20-list323.html @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @gribblelab.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor

Where you aim - not how you aim - affects implicit recalibration in visuomotor adaptation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.19.706918v1

Try this link, @joshcashaback.bsky.social!

drive.google.com/file/d/1BAKK...

Thanks for interest :)

Motor biases reflect a misalignment between visual and proprioceptive reference frames The pattern of reaching biases is stable across contexts and can be attributed to a misalignment between eye-centric and body-centric representations of position.

New @elife.bsky.social version of record:

We show that movement biases primarily reflect misalignment between visual and proprioceptive reference frames during motor planning.

Let us know if you have any feedback anytime!

elifesciences.org/articles/100...

New Paper: University of Pittsburgh Neural Engineering Cross-Translation (UP NExT) Initiative! 🧠✨ Lead author Golnaz Haddadshargh and a team of Pitt experts including George Wittenberg, & Jennifer Collinger have mapped how the human brain plans reaching movements. #NeuralEngineering #StrokeRecovery

Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

Identifying motor learning deficits in neurological conditions: a critical analysis of a perennial problem - Experimental Brain Research Experimental Brain Research - Identifying deficits in motor learning has the potential to serve as an indicator of brain function in several neurological conditions. However, evidence for motor...

Identifying motor learning deficits in neurological conditions: a critical analysis of a perennial problem
link.springer.com/article/10.1...