Just like that: poof & gone. RIP *all* of NSF social, behavioral and economic research (including psyc & cogneuro). I’m speechless.

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · yesterday

In response to our questions, an NSF spokesperson said that SBE has not been shut down. But with zero SBE-specific funding opportunities, no review panels, and dwindling numbers of staff, it's hard to see the directorate continuing for much longer.

Great article by first authors @laurenb29.bsky.social & Will de Cothi: Subicular spatial codes arise from predictive mapping www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Subicular spatial codes arise from predictive mapping - Nature Communications

Subiculum, the primary output structure of the hippocampus, remains an enigmatic structure in spatial processing. Here the authors reimagine subicular spatial responses as emerging from behaviour and ...

nature.com

How fast we decide reveals how we learn. New in @plos.org #PLoSCompBio : modeling response times alongside choices disentangles working memory, reinforcement learning and cognitive control, and reveals differences in schizophrenia that choices alone missed. 🧵 t.co/BTOgmpd4YH

Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.

I had a feeling recently that seems to be corroborated by chats with colleagues, so I decided to share it here. A lot of systems neuroscientists driven by algorithmic-level questions are going through what looks and feels like a research depression. 🧵 (1/n) 🧠📈 #NeuroAI

New preprint from our lab ⚡ Why do DA and BF bursting neurons carry such similar reward-prediction signals? Are they independent, driven by common input, or causally linked? We find a direct answer: DA activity rapidly and causally drives BF. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/10

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

New paper from the Neurosurgery research team at BCM! 🧵 "A population code for semantics in human hippocampus" led by Melissa Franch. We recorded hippocampus single neurons while people listened to podcasts. 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

What kind of dynamics underlie sequence working memory? In the last project of my PhD we developed and analysed RNNs fitted to multi-session single-unit data of macaques. Now out on: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... With @jakhmack.bsky.social and data from Chen et al., Neuron 2024. [1/4]

A project that I've been working on for the last couple of years (on & off), dealing with the question of how firing rates of neuronal populations change (1/6).

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

Heteroskedasticity of neuronal population responses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.26.754693v1

Incredibly excited to announce that I’m starting my own research group at Justus-Liebig-Universität in Gießen as part of the excellence cluster “The Adaptive Mind”! 🥳 I'm looking to fill the first PhD position. If you’re interested, apply here: tinyurl.com/38p3h22p Please spread the word! 🙏

Doctoral student (m/f/d) Computational Motivation – Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen

jobs.uni-giessen.de

Happy to have this finally out! TL;DR: The evolution of beliefs over time can be formulated as a dynamical system, and OFC neural activity appears to implement this system with its own dynamics. These emerge without explicit supervision—when animals learn to predict value in simple Pavlovian tasks

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Dynamic belief representation and updating through learned attractor-like dynamics in the frontal cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752495v1

This quote by haunts me. From Wilcox's "Introduction to Robust Estimation and Hypothesis Testing" #stats

I'm excited about this work that an amazing undergrad, @ariazhang.bsky.social, did with me and @tomerullman.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Aria showed how a neural net can discover abstractions for intuitive physics and use its own reliability estimates to decide when to deploy them.

Reliability-guided meta-control in intuitive physics

Intuitive physical reasoning is an important part of daily life, but the computations underlying it remain debated. Some prominent accounts propose intuitive physics relies on mental simulation, with ...

biorxiv.org

my favourite form of grad student flex: you roll up to lab meeting with pilot data which demonstrates that the study is working exactly as expected, but you didn't tell anyone ahead of time. the lab finds out all at once, together

sorry folks @ashleyjuavinett.bsky.social et al. just proved that neurons are canonically non-binary

Matt Lewis@neuroclef.bsky.social · 2w ago

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Very interesting

Amazing work by @sromeropinto.bsky.social ! Sandra found that in Pavlovian tasks with hidden states, neural population dynamics in mouse OFC resemble beliefs/state-inference

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Dynamic belief representation and updating through learned attractor-like dynamics in the frontal cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752495v1

XJ Wang left ?!? What a loss for the US (and NYU) Everyday I get some news that a prominent scientist is leaving. The chaos of the science budget and downfall of the American science are spiralling down very fast. This is disheartening. www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

World-renowned computational neuroscientist professor Xiao-Jing Wang joins HKU as Chair Professor

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) announces the appointment of Professor Xiao-Jing Wang, a pioneer in theoretical and computational neuroscience, to its faculty as a Chair Professor. Professor Wang wi...

eurekalert.org

new preprint: "Directing large language models to follow the letter or spirit of the law" arxiv.org/pdf/2609.23083 (by Qian , Li, Chen, Murthy @soniakmurthy.bsky.social , Belinkov, and me) this is particularly cool/important, and I'm allowed to say it because it was headed by @pqian.bsky.social

We also built a fast, differentiable form of DSA — ∂DSA. With this, we showed we can train RNNs online with DSA to learn novel, never-before-hypothesized solutions to computational tasks! (Stay tuned for future work on this too!) (8/)

There are more submissions to ICLR this year (at least 62,000) than in all previous years of the conference combined.

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘄𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 Neuroscientists now recording across the brain are finding what fMRI revealed in humans. Signals are not localized but often all over the brain. (NB: non, it's not everything, everywhere) #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Masa's paper is out in Hippocampus. The left-right alternation of hippocampal theta sequences at T-maze choice points, much loved as a 'planning' signal, falls straight out of MEC dynamics. Well done @masahironakano.bsky.social, fun project with @clopathlab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/hipo.70131

NEW PREPRINT ON LAB CULTURE: What is it, how is it related to mentorship, and how to document it? With @rademaker.bsky.social and Chris Pfund. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Granule cells predict future dopamine reward. Delayed climbing-fiber signals can reinforce the action that precedes it. Our paper, led by Benjamin Filio, is out today in Nature Neuroscience. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Public PDF: rdcu.be/RscCNeXvkXAa

Here is a graph.

New preprint! 🧠 How do reward, risk & information preferences relate to psychopathology? How do they vary across decisions about gains vs. losses? 1,954 people! Hundreds of economic choices each + transdiagnostic assessment of mental health symptoms online. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A dimensional link between gain-loss economic preferences and psychopathology

Human decision-makers differ in how they value and trade off reward, risk, and information when evaluating future gains and losses, and these preferences are central to well-being. However, how multi-...

biorxiv.org

Are virtual flies playing Beat Saber? SM64? Doom? No. The new fly connectome is an incredible achievement! Less is going on in the sim videos than it seems. I'm stoked to see people engage with neuroscience though. My breakdown: www.neuroai.science/p/are-flies-...

Are flies playing Beat Saber?

What a time to be alive!

neuroai.science

This is such cool work, especially the idea that on-manifold geometry is "imposed by the circuit's intrinsic dynamics" and not just stim encoding. We think something similar happens in human hippocampus—though tbf we haven't characterized the stimulus encoding dims yet bsky.app/profile/jhen...

Eliezyer de Oliveira@eliezyer.bsky.social · 3w ago

After a long journey through review, our paper is finally out in Nature Communications. We started with a simple problem: The visual cortex is strongly modulated by movement. So how can it represent the visual world without movement interfering with everything? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...