Excited to share my lab’s latest preprint led by postdoc @yukihaba.bsky.social and grad student Ryan Schwark. We surprisingly find that spontaneous behavior in isolation predicts a naked mole-rat’s identity, its colony membership, and even rank within its colony. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Proud to share our new work with @marcelomattar.bsky.social and @leaduncker.bsky.social, newly accepted to #NeurIPS2026 arxiv.org/abs/2609.17042. This paper is a precursor to a forthcoming follow up work that I hope will be one of the biggest papers of my career.

Learning Options for Compositional Motor Control with Adapter Banks

Learning flexible motor primitives is a hallmark of skilled motor control. Recent neuroscience theory proposes that motor primitives may be implemented as low-rank perturbations of a shared recurrent ...

arxiv.org

Jeee 🐦‍⬛ I am very proud of our joint effort with @sreejan.bsky.social on the project "Reason to Play" LRMs show human-like rule discovery, and their hidden states predict human brain activity during gameplay 10x better than previous methods Interactive demo + paper: botcs.github.io/reason-to-pl...

Reason to Play - Behavioral and Brain Alignment

32 fMRI-scanned humans and 8 frontier open weight LLMs play ARC-AGI like games with no rules given. The reasoning models match the human learning trajectories and their hidden states predict human bra...

botcs.github.io

will be at #Cosyne2026 presenting this new work on Saturday's posters session starting 1:15p! Come learn about how many seemingly disparate sensorimotor functions in the brain can be explained by a single anatomical motif and computational framework.

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

1/X Excited to present this preprint on multi-tasking, with @david-g-clark.bsky.social and Ashok Litwin-Kumar! Timely too, as “low-D manifold” has been trending again. (If you read thru the end, we escape Flatland and return to the glorious high-D world we deserve.) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A theory of multi-task computation and task selection

Neural activity during the performance of a stereotyped behavioral task is often described as low-dimensional, occupying only a limited region in the space of all firing-rate patterns. This region has...

biorxiv.org

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.” Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior. #cogsci #neuroskyence

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm excited to share that my new postdoctoral position is going so well that I submitted a new paper at the end of my first week! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A thread below

Sensory Compression as a Unifying Principle for Action Chunking and Time Coding in the Brain

The brain seamlessly transforms sensory information into precisely-timed movements, enabling us to type familiar words, play musical instruments, or perform complex motor routines with millisecond pre...

biorxiv.org

Congratulations to all our Columbia scientists recognized with NYAS 2025 Leon Levy Scholarships in Neuroscience: Matthew Eroglu, @yukihaba.bsky.social , @sreejan.bsky.social , Yuta Mabuchi and Keshav Suresh. 👏👏👏 Read more about the Scholars: bit.nyas.org/3Yoa6Pf

See me at #COSYNE2025 poster session 2 if you want to learn more about this emerging work!