Oren Forkosh

Oren Forkosh
Hebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences

Assistant professor

About

19
Publications
3,199
Reads
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505
Citations
Introduction
Assistant professor doing computational positive neuroscience @HebrewU: Using AI/ML to understand what makes people and animals happy https://www.forkoshlab.com
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
November 2013 - present
Weizmann Institute of Science
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (19)
Article
Social encounters are associated with varying degrees of emotional arousal and stress. The mechanisms underlying adequate socioemotional balance are unknown. The medial amygdala (MeA) is a brain region associated with social behavior in mice. Corticotropin-releasing factor receptor type-2 (CRF-R2) and its specific ligand urocortin-3 (Ucn3), known c...
Article
Full-text available
Social behavior in mammals is often studied in pairs under artificial conditions, yet groups may rely on more complicated social structures. Here, we use a novel system for tracking multiple animals in a rich environment to characterize the nature of group behavior and interactions, and show strongly correlated group behavior in mice. We have found...
Article
Full-text available
Personality traits can offer considerable insight into the biological basis of individual differences. However, existing approaches toward understanding personality across species rely on subjective criteria and limited sets of behavioral readouts, which result in noisy and often inconsistent outcomes. Here we introduce a mathematical framework for...
Article
Full-text available
We can now track the position of every fly's leg or immerse a tiny fish inside a virtual world by monitoring its gaze in real time. Yet capturing animals' posture or gaze is not like understanding their behavior. Instead, behaviors are still often interpreted by human observers in an anthropomorphic manner. Even newer tools that automatically class...
Preprint
Full-text available
For animals, the ability to hide and retrieve valuable information, such as the location of food, can mean the difference between life and death. Here, we propose that to achieve this, their brain uses spatial cells similarly to how we utilize encryption for data security. Some animals are able to cache hundreds of thousands of food items annually...
Article
Full-text available
The brain’s extraordinary abilities are often attributed to its capacity to learn and adapt. But memory has its limitations, especially when faced with tasks such as retrieving thousands of food items—a common behavior in scatter-hoarding animals. Here, we propose a brain mechanism that may facilitate caching and retrieval behaviors, with a focus o...
Preprint
Background Maladaptive aggression in humans is associated with several psychiatric conditions and lacks effective treatment. Nevertheless, aggression constitutes an essential behavior throughout the animal kingdom as long as it is tightly regulated. Studying how social dominance hierarchies (SDH) regulate aggression and access to resources in an en...
Article
Full-text available
The outset of the COVID-19 pandemic was characterized by prolonged periods of chronic stress and social isolation. While studies have investigated the changes to well-being (WB) during this period, the impact of the social environment on long-term physical and mental health requires further study. This study aimed to assess the factors influencing...
Article
Our neurons seem capable of handling any type of data, regardless of its scale or statistical properties. In this letter, we suggest that optimal coding may occur at the single-neuron level without requiring memory, adaptation, or evolutionary-driven fit to the stimuli. We refer to a neural circuit as optimal if it maximizes the mutual information...
Preprint
Full-text available
Differences in animal personalities are generally hard to measure - even in an animal as common as the house mouse. Yet, in some rare cases, nature has provided us with clear visual cues as to the nature of a specific individual. These so-called badges are the case for the side botched lizard, often referred to as the 'rock-paper-scissor' lizard. H...
Article
Full-text available
Complex behavioral phenotyping techniques are becoming more prevalent in the field of behavioral neuroscience, and thus methods for manipulating neuronal activity must be adapted to fit into such paradigms. Here, we present a head-mounted, magnetically activated device for wireless optogenetic manipulation that is compact, simple to construct, and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neural networks seem to be able to handle almost any task they face. This feat involves coping efficiently with different data types, at multiple scales, and with varying statistical properties. Here, we show that this so-called optimal coding can occur at the single-neuron level and does not require adaptation. Differentiator neurons, i.e., neuron...
Preprint
Full-text available
Personality traits offer considerable insight into the biological basis of individual differences. However, existing approaches toward understanding personality across species rely on subjective criteria and limited sets of behavioral readouts, resulting in noisy and often inconsistent outcomes. Here, we introduce a mathematical framework for study...
Article
POMC neurons in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus are central components of systems regulating appetite and energy homeostasis. Here, we report on the establishment of a mouse model in which the RNase III ribonuclease Dicer-1 has been specifically deleted from POMC expressing neurons (POMC(ΔDCR)), leading to postnatal cell death. Mice are bor...

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