Why do stressful childhood experiences lead people to make maladaptive choices? This study suggests early experiences lead individuals to expect environments to be volatile, explaining why their decisions feel appropriate to them. shorturl.at/e0tZC 🧪 @kesmith.bsky.social @payampiray.bsky.social

We review studies showing that when brain areas face similar computational demands in social and non-social context, they perform the same computations. We argue that exaptation (repurposing of traits for new functions) played a key role in brain evolution.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience@natrevneuro.nature.com · 6mo ago

Computational origins of cortical brain circuits for social cognition — a Perspective article by Ali Mahmoodi & Matthew F. S. Rushworth @alimahmoodi.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter. How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need? Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour

Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

nature.com

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions rdcu.be/eRVUk

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces

Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

rdcu.be

Happy to share my new paper published in @nathumbehav.nature.com: A critical look at statistical power in computational modeling studies, particularly those based on model selection. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🎇 Excited to finally share JL Romero Sosa’s publication! Results are from single-cell imaging in different subregions of rat frontal cortex during ✨de novo learning. Spoiler: everything is not everywhere all at once www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Neural coding of choice and outcome are modulated by uncertainty in orbitofrontal but not secondary motor cortex - Nature Communications

Neural mechanisms underlying flexible learning and decision-making are not fully understood. Using single-cell calcium imaging, authors here found that neurons in orbitofrontal and secondary motor cortex exhibit complementary roles in reward learning, with neurons in the former exerting a sustained role in conditions of uncertainty.

nature.com

Good news of the front of restoring UCLA's grants! calmatters.org/education/20...

Federal judge orders Trump administration to restore hundreds of UCLA research grants

The grants were terminated over alleged DEI violations. University of California attorneys argued the actions were arbitrary and capricious.

calmatters.org

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex. rdcu.be/eAofi

Reconciling flexibility and efficiency: medial entorhinal cortex represents a compositional cognitive map

Nature Communications - How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a...

rdcu.be

It looks like all NSF/NIH grants to UCLA (including mine and all fundamental neuroscience grants) have been suspended. www.science.org/content/arti...

NSF and NIH suspend grants to UCLA

Move follows Trump administration finding that school didn’t effectively combat antisemitism

science.org

Check out Zaid's open "Podcast" ECoG dataset for natural language comprehension (w/ Hasson Lab). The paper is now out at Scientific Data (nature.com/articles/s41...) and the data are available on OpenNeuro (openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...).

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature

Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

doi.org

new paper from a collaborative endeavor! (@co0p3r.bsky.social) we find & replicate food-reward biases in a reinforcement learning task (where food stim are incidental) people with eating disorder symptoms show a low-calorie food bias while those without show a high-calorie food bias... (1/3)

Eating disorder symptoms and emotional arousal modulate food biases during reward learning in females - Nature Communications

Disordered eating can disrupt the rewarding value of food. Here, the authors show in a female sample that eating disorder symptoms, emotional arousal, and interoceptive awareness modulate goal-ir...

nature.com

Re-posting is appreciated: We have a fully funded PhD position in CMC lab @cmc-lab.bsky.social (at @tudresden_de). You can use forms.gle/qiAv5NZ871kv... to send your application and find more information. Deadline is April 30. Find more about CMC lab: cmclab.org and email me if you have questions.

Very cool work on the intersection of interpretability and multi-lingual LLMs, led by @elnaz-rahmati.bsky.social

Elnaz Rahmati@elnaz-rahmati.bsky.social · last yr.

Read our latest work CoCo-CoLa on measuring and improving language adherence in multilingual LLMs with efficient fine-tuning. 📖 arxiv.org/abs/2502.12476 Thanks to my co-authors @alirezaziabari.bsky.social and @mdehghani.bsky.social for their collaboration! #LLMs #NLP #Multilinguality

Our new paper explores how to align LLMs with System 1 (intuitive) and System 2 (analytical) thinking styles. This work challenges the idea that step-by-step reasoning (CoT) is always best and highlights the need for adapting reasoning strategies based on the task arxiv.org/abs/2502.12470

hello world. we have an opening for a strong theory postdoc to work in my lab on a exciting collaboration with Josh Berke and Loren Frank labs modeling and analyzing data on rat hipp-pfc-bg-da involvement in spatial maze foraging, replay, value etc. apply here: www.princeton.edu/acad-positio...

Poster submissions for the Computational Psychiatry Conference 2025 in Tübingen are now open. Deadline is 7th February. Symposium submissions are open until 15th January. www.cpconf.org. Please RB.

Computational Psychiatry Conference

Tübingen, Germany (July 14-16, 2025)

cpconf.org

(1/4) Our new JEP:G paper dives into how moral values and misinformation spread on social media: media.mola-lab.org/file/1737039...

I'm hiring a full-time lab manager / research tech for my new psychology lab at Boston University, to start this summer (July 2025)! The lab's research focuses on understanding developmental changes in learning, memory, and exploration. More details here: cldlab.org/join/ 🧠💻 #psychscisky

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019). The renamed: Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

Neuromatch is looking for a curriculum specialist for our #neuroAI course. Spread the word! acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:...

Come join us at Trinity College Dublin for the 6th Multidisciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM2025) Abstract deadline January 15: rldm.org/submit

Did you know #RLDM2025 is coming to Dublin next June? rldm.org Abstract submission open now ☘️ 🇮🇪

X’s (it is definitely X not twitter) “For you” tab should be called 'Not for you'! Meanwhile, Bluesky feels like a cozy science cafe! 🧠☕️ Computational neuro/psychiatry folks, NeuroAI enthusiasts, cognitive science/neuroscience students - let's build this community!

New in Nature Communication with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social : humans tell apart volatility from stochasticity & adapt their learning adaptively in opposite directions. Both response times and prediction data suggest outcome autocorrelation is key in this process www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Computational processes of simultaneous learning of stochasticity and volatility in humans - Nature Communications

Adaptive learning is difficult in noisy environments, yet people often succeed. Here, the authors show that humans do this by distinguishing between two easily confused types of noise—volatility and s...

nature.com

I'll be recruiting PhD students for Fall 2025. Take a look at the lab website and the FAQ for prospective students: piraylab.com/join Feel free to reach out if you have questions.

Piray Lab | Join us

The lab will be looking for PhD students, postdocs, and research assistants who want to do research at the intersection of computational and cognitive neuroscience. We are looking for students from a ...

piraylab.com

🧠💻 @USCPsychology seeks tenure-track Assistant Professor in Brain & Cognitive Sciences with a focus on computational language research. Join us at the forefront of AI-driven cognition studies! Apply here: usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

I'll be recruiting PhD students for Fall 2024. Take a look at the lab website and the FAQ for prospective students: piraylab.com/join Feel free to reach out if you have questions.

Piray Lab | Join us

The lab will be looking for PhD students, postdocs, and research assistants who want to do research at the intersection of computational and cognitive neuroscience. We are looking for students from a ...

piraylab.com