Jennifer Bussell PhD
@jenbussell.bsky.social
Neuroscientist studying information seeking and curiosity via mouse models at Columbia University. Previously at Vosshall Lab at Rockefeller University. Mom in Brooklyn, former S Carolinian www.jenniferbussell.org
Political science
68%
Sociology
15%
Pinned
Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience
Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...
www.nature.com
How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)
Reposted by Jennifer Bussell
Dopamine release-associated striatal blood oxygenation and whole-brain dynamics during associative learning
Dopaminergic signaling in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is central to reward-based learning, but its relationship to brain-wide hemodynamics remains unclear. Using concurrent fMRI and dopamine photometr...
www.science.org
Excited to see our fMRI paper is out, led by Itamar Kahn’s lab. Our grad students, Amir Lawen and Bella Succi, in collab with Darcy Peterka, built a setup for simultaneous fMRI and dopamine fiber photometry in awake behaving mice. We learned some new biology too.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
One of America’s Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center
A rare 200-tree American chestnut grove in West Virginia may be cleared for data-center development, but the project denies the site is on its land.
www.gadgetreview.com
To put this in perspective chestnut trees used to be dominant species in the United States. Billions of trees were killed by fungal blight and now fully grown America chestnuts are functionally extinct. There is no getting them back. Ever. All for a data center.
www.gadgetreview.com/one-of-ameri...
www.gadgetreview.com/one-of-ameri...
Reposted by Jennifer Bussell
Modality-specific reactive and predictive responses in the human superior colliculus - Nature Neuroscience
Chen et al. use 7-Tesla fMRI to show that the human superior colliculus has modality-specific, depth-dependent activity prior to visual or somatosensory events, resembling its response to actual stimu...
www.nature.com
The brain represents expected sensory information before it arrives. Activity predicting upcoming visual or tactile input appeared even in early subcortical sensory regions, suggesting prediction is built into sensory processing from its earliest stages. www.nature.com/articles/s41...