Paul Masset

Research Areas:

Behavioural Neuroscience

Research Summary:

My research group integrates ideas and methods from systems neuroscience, experimental psychology and machine learning to understand how the heterogeneity of neuron types endows brain circuits with efficient distributed computations underlying behavior and cognition. We develop and experimentally validate new models of distributed computation in brain circuits including a new understanding of how dopamine-based distributed reinforcement learning could be implemented in the brain. To answer these questions, we perform large scale electrophysiological recordings in rodents performing complex behavioral tasks, build new data analysis tools and develop new classes of biologically plausible neural networks.

Selected References:

Tolooshams, B., Matias, S., Wu, H., Temereanca, S., Uchida, N., Murthy, V. N., Masset, P. & Ba, D. (2024). Interpretable deep learning for deconvolutional analysis of neural signals. bioRxiv, 2024-01.

Masset, P., Tano, P., Kim, H. R., Malik, A. N., Pouget, A., & Uchida, N. (2023). Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain. bioRxiv, 2023-11.

Zavatone-Veth, J. A., Masset, P., Tong, W. L., Zak, J. D., Murthy, V. N., & Pehlevan, C. (2023). Neural circuits for fast Poisson compressed sensing in the olfactory bulb. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36.

Masset, P., Zavatone-Veth, J., Connor, J. P., Murthy, V., & Pehlevan, C. (2022). Natural gradient enables fast sampling in spiking neural networks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35, 22018-22034.

Masset, P., Qin, S., & Zavatone-Veth, J. A. (2022). Drifting neuronal representations: Bug or feature?. Biological cybernetics, 116(3), 253-266.

Ott, T., Masset, P., Gouvêa, T. S., & Kepecs, A. (2022). Apparent sunk cost effect in rational agents. Science Advances, 8(6), eabi7004.

Masset, P., Ott, T., Lak, A., Hirokawa, J., & Kepecs, A. (2020). Behavior-and modality-general representation of confidence in orbitofrontal cortex. Cell, 182(1), 112-126.

Hirokawa, J., Vaughan, A., Masset, P., Ott, T., & Kepecs, A. (2019). Frontal cortex neuron types categorically encode single decision variables. Nature, 576(7787), 446-451.