I am a Neuroscience researcher at RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan. My work focuses on visual perception and decision-making. I am particularly interested in how visual information is combined with internal biases and cognitive states to guide behavior. To study these topics, I use statistical and machine learning methods, advanced data analysis and experiments. My lab is led by Dr. Andrea Benucci, and you can visit our website here.
As a part of my PhD training, I worked under the supervision of Dr. Nicholas Lesica at the University College London, Ear Institute, where I studied factors that affect correlated neural activity in populations of sensory neurons. I obtained a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Graduate School of Systems Neurosciences, and I hold an MSc from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
I am a big fan of the first principles approach in Neuroscience, as well as of using models to help inform and design the experiments. I also appreciate it when methods from machine learning toolkit provide deeper insight into the neural and behavioral data. Examples of such papers are this, this, and this.
More broadly, I am interested in the differences and similarities between natural and artificial intelligence, and how understanding one can help us better understand the other, I am fascinated by the ability of the brain to solve computationally intractable inference problems by resorting to approximate choice heuristics, and I am interested in the ways that the ideas of neural representation and neural coding are reexamined given the massive recurrency of brain circuits and the redundancy of computations.
2021 J. G. Orlandi, M. Abdolrahmani, R. Aoki, D. R. Lyamzin, A. Benucci. Distributed context-dependent choice information in mouse dorsal-parietal cortex. bioRxiv doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.02.433657
2021 D. R. Lyamzin, R. Aoki, M. Abdolrahmani, A. Benucci. Probabilistic discrimination of relative stimulus features in mice. PNAS 118(30):e2103952118
2021 M. Abdolrahmani*, D. R. Lyamzin*, R. Aoki, A. Benucci. Attention separates sensory and motor signals in the mouse visual cortex. Cell Reports 36(2):109377
2019 D. Lyamzin, A. Benucci. The mouse posterior parietal cortex: anatomy and functions. Neurosci. Research 140:14-22
2015 D. R. Lyamzin, S. J. Barnes, R. Donato, J. A. Garcia-Lazaro, T. Keck, N. A. Lesica. Nonlinear transfer of signal and noise correlations in cortical networks. J Neurosci. 35(21): 8065-8080
2015 M. Pachitariu, D. R. Lyamzin, M. Sahani, N. A. Lesica. State-dependent population coding in primary auditory cortex. J Neurosci. 35(5):2058-73
2014 L. Belliveau, D. R. Lyamzin, N. A. Lesica. The neural representation of interaural time differences in gerbils is transformed from midbrain to cortex. J Neurosci. 34(50):16796-16808
2012 D. R. Lyamzin, J. A. Garcia-Lazaro, N.A. Lesica. Analysis and modelling of variability and covariability of population spike trains across multiple time scales. Network: Computation in Neural Systems, 2012, 23:1-2, 76-103
2010 D. R. Lyamzin, J. H. Macke, N. A. Lesica. Modeling population spike trains with specified time-varying spike rates, trial-to-trial variability, and pairwise signal and noise correlations. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 2010, 4:144.