David Robbe
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davidrobbe.bsky.social
David Robbe
@davidrobbe.bsky.social
470 followers 470 following 79 posts
Neuroscientist at Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerannée (Marseille).
Basal ganglia, time, effort, foraging, vigor, motor control.
Leaning toward philosophy (obsessed with Henri Bergson)
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davidrobbe.bsky.social
David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · Jul 2
Excited to share our new paper: "The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice,". Out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social

🧵1/9

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice
Biological sciences; Behavioral neuroscience; Laboratory animal science
www.cell.com
Reposted by David Robbe
inmed.bsky.social
With profound sadness we announce the passing of our colleague and friend Antoine de Chevigny, an expert in cortical development respected for his creativity and curiosity and cherished for his kindness and joie de vivre. He leaves an immense void.
Support for his partner: tinyurl.com/2yrh7huc
August 27, 2026 at 9:24 AM
Reposted by David Robbe
zamakany.bsky.social
New Study! @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Often foraging models assume that the forager knows the environment and proceed to predict decision strategies but how does the foraging learn the structure of the environment ?

A new preprint delves into this question
August 3, 2026 at 7:39 AM
davidrobbe.bsky.social
Zelda Timmel and Maud Schaffhauser @maudschaffh.bsky.social, 2 outstanding PhD students I am lucky to work with, had a blast yesterday at #FENS presenting their poster on the role of the striatum in decision making and motor control during foraging.
July 10, 2026 at 10:57 AM
Reposted by David Robbe
zamakany.bsky.social
Check this exciting new foraging paper. Very excited that we are currently collaborating with @davidrobbe.bsky.social group to model behavioral mechanisms underlying foraging startegies in the The Tower Foraging Park.
July 2, 2026 at 5:06 PM
davidrobbe.bsky.social
Excited to share our new paper: "The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice,". Out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social

🧵1/9

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice
Biological sciences; Behavioral neuroscience; Laboratory animal science
www.cell.com
July 2, 2026 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
carandinilab.net
Neuropixels + Optogenetics = Neuropixels Opto

Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics. 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors.

Today in @natmethods.nature.com

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social, @alleninstitute.org, @hhmijanelia.bsky.social & team.
June 1, 2026 at 11:20 AM
davidrobbe.bsky.social
This will never cease to astonish me. Not only the nonsense of the request, but also the time pressure.
Does this strategy work? Do people really send preprints to these journals?
December 30, 2025 at 11:16 AM
Reposted by David Robbe
schreinerdrew.bsky.social
Cool basal ganglia preprints today!

2 on DA/ACh
1. @paulkramer.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

2. @arifahamid.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Motor learning @juangallego.bsky.social and @clopathlab.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Excitatory nicotinic signaling drives action potential bursting in dopaminergic axons
Axons of dopamine (DA) neurons express nicotinic receptors (nAChRs) that have been shown to both facilitate and suppress striatal DA release, but the mechanisms underlying these opposing actions are u...
www.biorxiv.org
December 21, 2025 at 12:05 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
currentbiology.bsky.social
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL OF YOU!🎄✨
December 19, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
andpru.bsky.social
Peer review is important and useful but we should focus our efforts on a small number of papers that matter (making big claims, using new approaches) and let the vast majority of work live on a preprint server to be judged by their utility over time to domain experts.
carlbergstrom.com Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Nov 28
Springer-Nature statement

“Whilst the details of peer review are confidential, we can confirm that the article underwent two rounds of review from two independent peer reviewers, supporting an accept decision.”

How am I now expected to believe that two people looked at the paper twice and DGAF?
Riding the Autism Bicycle to Retraction Town
Does anyone *really* know their Factor Fexcectorn?
nobreakthroughs.substack.com
December 11, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
“Women who think critically are always labeled difficult because it saves the world from admitting they’re right” — bell hooks

Repost of Charmaine Simpson, on LinkendIN: www.linkedin.com/posts/blackh...
Picture accompanying a post from Linked in by Charmaine Simpson https://www.linkedin.com/posts/blackhistorystudies_bell-hooks-understood-a-pattern-that-repeats-activity-7403886502771888128-CJiy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAFk0BcBSukv5EZ8IStyE-ugz6Io2JLp0iQ "bell hooks understood a pattern that repeats across generations. When a woman thinks critically, people often label her difficult before they ever engage with her ideas. The label is a shortcut. A way to dismiss her without confronting what she is actually saying. Critical thinking is powerful because it interrupts comfort. It asks why things are the way they are. It exposes contradictions that many would rather leave unspoken. So instead of addressing her insight, the world questions her tone. It reframes her clarity as attitude. It turns her precision into a flaw. But women who think critically are not difficult. They are necessary. They hold up mirrors that others avoid. They name truths that would otherwise stay buried. To think for yourself is not an invitation for conflict. It is an act of presence. It is choosing awareness over silence. And every time a woman refuses to apologize for her mind, she shifts the world a little closer to honesty. From Her Archives "
December 9, 2025 at 10:14 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
wiringthebrain.bsky.social
Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... - thought-provoking (2019) paper from @urihasson.bsky.social and colleagues
Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks
Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes …
www.sciencedirect.com
December 10, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Reposted by David Robbe
lukesjulson.bsky.social
Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/
Plot showing metabolic rate and brain size vs. body mass. Warm-blooded animals expend an order of magnitude more energy and have brain sizes an order of magnitude larger
December 8, 2025 at 1:31 PM
davidrobbe.bsky.social
This review below by Herz and Brown, about effort, bradykinesia in Parkinson disease is really such an excellent read. If you are interested in dopamine, basal ganglia, motor control and motivation, this is really a must read 👌

doi.org/10.1093/brai...
Moving, fast and slow: behavioural insights into bradykinesia in Parkinson’s disease
Herz and Brown review observations of movement slowness in Parkinson’s disease and discuss these findings in a behavioural framework borrowing principles f
doi.org
December 4, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
romainbrette.bsky.social
My book "The Brain, in Theory" on the publisher's website (out in April 2026):
press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
The Brain, In Theory
Why engineering and computational analogies are poorly suited to the study of biological cognition
press.princeton.edu
November 18, 2025 at 8:25 AM
Reposted by David Robbe
brainapps.bsky.social
Super pleased with this one, led by the amazing PhD student and foraging expert @emmavscholey.bsky.social!
markdhumphries.bsky.social Mark D Humphries @markdhumphries.bsky.social · Nov 12
🧪Preprint!
How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions.

A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches.

A 🧵
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With
@emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social
November 12, 2025 at 8:07 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
russpoldrack.org
Project structure for scientific coding projects
- the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series open.substack.com/pub/russpold...
Project structure for scientific coding projects
Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 6, Part 3
open.substack.com
November 11, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
jayvanbavel.bsky.social
The race to churn out papers is a systemic problem.

Early career scholars are desperate to get more papers to compete in the academic job market. This can make it hard for faculty mentors hard to reduce their output unless they shrink their lab (which removes opportunities from next generation).
November 11, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by David Robbe
runewberg.bsky.social
New preprint:

Neural manifolds that orchestrate walking and stopping

Here we develop a new theory for neural generation of walking and how it can stop- Next we test the theory using Neuropixels probes in the lumber spinal cord of freely moving rats. See more:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
November 9, 2025 at 9:33 PM
davidrobbe.bsky.social
A yr ago, I wrote a piece about what is becoming a quasi-obsession in neuroscience: internal models/representations. I’m kind of stuck and not sure what to do with it. Meanwhile, I came across 2 excellent "critical" papers on the same topic by @olivia.science and @smellosopher.bsky.social 🙏💪 :
November 11, 2025 at 11:10 AM
davidrobbe.bsky.social
I haven’t posted much here since leaving Twitter/X, but I feel a growing need to share again papers and thoughts about science, the brain, and our too often absurd academic life . My feed hasn’t been very exciting so far, so let’s see if posting and interacting more helps
November 11, 2025 at 10:40 AM
Reposted by David Robbe
hugospiers.bsky.social
New preprint from Satoshi Kuroki & Sébastien Royer

Grid cells encode reward distance during path integration in cue-rich environments

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...
October 22, 2025 at 9:43 AM
Reposted by David Robbe
adrianhaith.bsky.social
New Pre-Print:
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

We’re all familiar with having to practice a new skill to get better at it, but what really happens during practice? The answer, I propose, is reinforcement learning - specifically policy-gradient reinforcement learning.

Overview 🧵 below...
Policy-Gradient Reinforcement Learning as a General Theory of Practice-Based Motor Skill Learning
Mastering any new skill requires extensive practice, but the computational principles underlying this learning are not clearly understood. Existing theories of motor learning can explain short-term ad...
www.biorxiv.org
October 20, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Reposted by David Robbe
markdhumphries.bsky.social
🚨Registration for Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025 closes October 20th 🚨

Speakers
@mkflugge.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @benhayden.bsky.social @ellileadbeater.bsky.social
@davidrobbe.bsky.social @dlbarack.bsky.social @becketebs.bsky.social

uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...
Home - The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging
uobevents.eventsair.com
October 13, 2025 at 9:23 AM