This is a really cool paper by @arminbazza.bsky.social and @payampiray.bsky.social. It's a neat idea that explains some puzzling observations about hippocampal replay. Also very clearly written.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · last wk.

Hippocampal replay repairs the cognitive map for flexible planning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.20.760493v1

Seeing can cause forgetting! Check out @akulsatish.bsky.social 's preprint showing that difficult perceptual discriminations induce an amnesic shadow, a collab with Justin Hulbert. @charan-neuro.bsky.social @mariamaly.bsky.social @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our SPOT grid is now published! This is a novel image set that factorially crosses scene-object and texture-pattern pairs to allow investigations of how these features contribute to behavior & brain activity. Led by the amazing Zall Hirschstein, in a collaboration w/ @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social

The SPOT Grid: Naturalistic images with predefined settings, patterns, objects, and textures - Behavior Research Methods

In the natural world, higher-level visual features (e.g., scenes and objects) systematically covary with specific lower-level constituent features (e.g., textures and patterns). This natural covariati...

link.springer.com

1/ Our brains probably don’t store a new copy of “red” when we encounter something red. Yet we can reinstate distinct memories of red objects. How do we reuse what we already know when encoding memories? Excited to share new work led by @haoliu4391.bsky.social, with @marcelomattar.bsky.social 🧠🧵

Do brain connections just carry information between regions, or do they transform it? Lab's latest is out in Nature Neuroscience, led by Lakshman Chakravarthula: "Network geometry shapes the transformation of task representations across the human cortex" www.colelab.org/pubs/Chakrav... 1/n

Imagine two people standing in the same spot, looking at the same Goya. They inspect exactly the same parts of the painting, but in a different order. Later, they talk about what they saw. Ignoring all other differences: are the memories they formed identical?

New preprint out (first from my new group!) 🚨 "Predictive Grid Cell Coding Does Not Require Explicit Planning" biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

Predictive Grid Cell Coding Does Not Require Explicit Planning

Predictive grid cells, a recently discovered functional class of neurons in medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), exhibit grid-like tuning, not with respect to where an animal currently is, but where it wil...

biorxiv.org

Hi all, I'm happy to announce that I have started at the University of Oregon as an assistant professor! My group will use computational methods to study learning and synaptic plasticity. I will be hiring grad students this year--please reach out if you're interested! colinbre@uoregon.edu

I'm recruiting PhD students this cycle! We study how the brain perceives, remembers, and predicts naturalistic experiences like movies and games, using computational tools to analyze behavioral and neural data 🧠 App deadline is 12/2/26 - see our lab pubs on our website www.dpmlab.org/pubs.html

I will be accepting a Master’s or PhD student to join my lab at University of North Carolina Wilmington! If you know any students that may be interested, please share this post with them. My lab: calmlab.science Master’s: www.uncw.edu/academics/ma... PhD: www.uncw.edu/academics/ma...

Excited to see this work published! We find that the brain codes semantic relationships similar to contextual LLMs (like GPT2) but unlike LLMs, uses contrastive coding to prevent confusion of highly similar words. Many thanks to the reviewers and BCM neurosurgery team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A population code for semantics in human hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience

Franch et al. show that human hippocampal neurons encode the meanings of the words we hear through distributed, context-sensitive population activity that mirrors some features of large language model...

nature.com

neuromarkers.io : Browse, view, and download fMRI neuromarkers, population-level predictive brain models that can be applied to new studies and populations

Neuromarkers · CANlab

Population-level brain patterns for new studies. Browse, explore, and download published neuromarkers.

canlab.github.io

How do we prevent memories from competing to guide attention? More distinct hippocampal representations for competing memories are linked to precise preparatory coding in visual cortex & more accurate eye movements to target locations. Thrilled to share this work by the incomparable Serra Favila!

New paper from my lab! We show that the retrieval state is recruited during both episodic and semantic retrieval, but not for perceptual judgments, suggesting that the retrieval state tracks domain-general internal attention. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/3...

A Shared Brain State for Episodic and Semantic Retrieval

It is critical to identify which factors induce specific brain states as these large-scale patterns of coordinated neural activity drive downstream processing and behavior. The retrieval state, a brai...

jneurosci.org

🧠🚨 How can we measure the latent cognitive processes that work together during complex behavior? In our new Perspective, we propose cross-domain transfer: learning a neural signature of a cognitive process in one task and using it to track that process in another. 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

(1/9) Preprint Alert! 🚨 New work on how the brain comprehends narratives. 🧠🎥 Are "Key Moments" - our recent line of research - truly distinct from "Event Boundaries"? We put them to the test to see if these two constructs differ from each other. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Confused about all this talk of compositionality in neuroscience? Read our new perspective www.nature.com/articles/s41... with authors Reidar Riveland and Alex Pouget.

The compositionality continuum as a principle for studying the neural basis of intelligence - Nature Neuroscience

Compositionality exists on a continuum of increasing complexity rather than as a binary trait. Studying its implementation in simpler biological and artificial systems is the most tractable path towar...

nature.com

Now in Science: How does the brain’s navigation system allocate its limited representational resources during behavior? We found that grid cells sweep toward locations of interest, providing a potential mechanism for allocating spatial attention in the cognitive map.🧵 science.org/doi/10.1126/...

If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

biorxiv.org

Excited to finally share our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com: Hippocampal ripples initiate cortical dimensionality expansion for memory retrieval www.nature.com/articles/s41... With @s-michelmann.bsky.social and @doellerlab.bsky.social

Hippocampal ripples initiate cortical dimensionality expansion for memory retrieval - Nature Communications

How past experiences are reconstructed from memory remains unclear. Here the authors used intracranial EEG to show that hippocampal ripples reshape the geometry of cortical representations, supporting...

nature.com

My lab is hiring! We are recruiting a full time research coordinator to support our projects on memory brain states. More info and application: jobs.virginia.edu/us/en/job/R0...

Research Coordinator, Long Term Memory Lab - Psychology in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America | Other at University of Virginia

Apply for Research Coordinator, Long Term Memory Lab - Psychology job with University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America. Other at University of Virginia

jobs.virginia.edu

Excited to share that my first-ever first-author paper (w/ @atabk.bsky.social @AngeliqueDelarazan @zreagh.bsky.social) is now out in PNAS! Building a story to link two objects boosts associative memory and inference, but not memory for the objects themselves. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Active linking through narratives facilitates associative inference | PNAS

In daily life, we often draw inferences about novel associations from prior experiences. This ability, associative inference, is thought to be a ke...

pnas.org

Our paper is out in @natmachintell.nature.com! We trained multiple RNNs to perform free recall. The best-performing ones learned a strategy akin to the memory palace technique. See thread below for more info. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

A neural network model of free recall learns multiple memory strategies - Nature Machine Intelligence

Li et al. show that recurrent neural networks optimized for free recall discover diverse, human-like memory strategies beyond classical temporal context models, with top models using an index-based me...

nature.com

From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature

Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.

nature.com

Excited to share this work, led by Andrew Zimnik and Sherry An, from @mchurchland.bsky.social and my labs! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... 1/2

Sparse component analysis: A method that uncovers separable computations within neural population activity

Zimnik et al. provide a new, interpretable, unsupervised dimensionality approach for neural population activity. Their approach, sparse component analysis (SCA), reveals the latent factors correspondi...

cell.com

My fMRI study from the Mack Lab (@drmack.bsky.social) is now published on JNeuro! Here, we look into how hippocampal subfields flexibly update category knowledge representations in the face of novel exceptions. Check out the article here: doi.org/10.1523/JNEU....

Distinct Hippocampal Subfield Representational Shifts Underlie Category Exception Learning

When we encounter an exception to our prior category knowledge, such as a leaf-like butterfly that perceptually diverges from the butterflies we commonly see, we must update our knowledge to reconcile...

doi.org

Very excited to share our new review on C-HORSE, our model of the hippocampus! We think there is very encouraging alignment between C-HORSE proposals and the extant empirical literature, though we also note plenty of areas for further model development. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Evidence for complementary learning systems within the hippocampus

Abstract. Decades of research have established the hippocampus as central to episodic memory, but growing evidence suggests that it also contributes to str

royalsocietypublishing.org

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes? The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions. New work w/ @hannahtarder-stoll.bsky.social & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social – part of the theme issue on hippocampal predictions!

The hippocampus rapidly integrates sequence representations during novel multistep predictions

Abstract. Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the

royalsocietypublishing.org

New work on agency and memory by @xianl-explorer.bsky.social, Janice Chen, myself and others! Using choose-your-own-adventures, we found that agency doesn’t always improve memory. Instead, agency personalized memory ❄️ ❄️ — even when people read the same text. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint! We show low arousal states promote hippocampal ripple genesis in sleep and wake. This bridges rodent work, where ripples predominate during sleep, with human studies reporting ripples during active behavior, identifying low arousal as a common mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Arousal state modulates human hippocampal ripples

Hippocampal ripples are transient, high-frequency oscillations linked to memory replay and consolidation. Ripples are well-characterized in rodents to occur during periods of behavioral inactivity (i....

biorxiv.org