🚨Another PI job opening in the Neuroscience dept. at @umontreal.ca ! 🚨 www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Professor at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor, in the field of neurocircuitry - Montréal, Quebec (CA) job with Université de Montréal | 12843808

Professor at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor, in the field of neurocircuitry involved in the production of complex behaviors

nature.com

Trans rights are human rights. Fresh work incoming: Here we quantitatively compare the representational geometry of mouse CA1 and human spatial memory during environmental deformations. Briefest TLDR: Human memory looks like a change-resistant version of mouse CA1. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Change-resistance distinguishes the representational geometries of human spatial memory and mouse CA1 in deformed environments

Prior work has highlighted qualitative similarities between the neural instantiations of cognitive maps in rodents and memory-guided navigation in humans, suggesting a conservation of representational...

biorxiv.org

Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall! My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵

Excited to share the sequel to our 2022 paper! In this follow-up, we show that the stable head direction (HD) signals we reported in blind mice rely on stereo olfaction—that is, the comparison of odor info. between the two nostrils. Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵highlights below

Stereo olfaction underlies stable coding of head direction in blind mice - Nature Communications

Stereo olfaction involves comparing odor differences between the two nostrils. Here, using neuronal recordings and a behavioral test, the authors demonstrate that blind mice use stereo olfaction to fo...

nature.com

BTSP, but not STDP, can account for place field changes in hippocampus, out in Nature Neuroscience today: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪

Synaptic plasticity rules driving representational shifting in the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience

Madar et al. report that behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not spike-timing-dependent plasticity, explains heterogeneous place fields shifting in the hippocampus. The probability of BTS...

nature.com

The dataset and code for our recent paper in Neuron (tinyurl.com/yc48d6vr) is online now! The data is available on Zenodo (zenodo.org/records/1486...) and code on Github (github.com/jquinnlee/ge...). Big thanks to @markbrandonlab.bsky.social and @atkeinath.bsky.social on this effort! #neuroskyence 🧠

Looking forward to seeing you all in Montreal this week 🧠🧠🧠 Use #cosyne2025 so we can 👀 what you're up to!!

1/ Our paper appeared in @Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... w/ Fiete Lab and @khonamikail.bsky.social . Explains emergence of multiple grid cell modules, w/ excellent match to data! Novel mechanism for applying across vast systems from development to ecosystems. 🧵👇

Global modules robustly emerge from local interactions and smooth gradients - Nature

The principle of peak selection is described, by which local interactions and smooth gradients drive self-organization of discrete global modules.

nature.com

Position open for Director of Research Innovation & Operations at Concordia as part of the Abundant Intelligences (www.indigenous-ai.net/abundant/) project, which seeks to reshape AI with indigenous insights: www.kbrs.ca/Career/17387... Please share!!! 🧪 #MLSky

Director of Research Innovation & Operations (DRIO) – Abundant Intelligences

Application deadline: March 21, 2025

kbrs.ca

Very pleased to share our recent work, in which we use LLMs for automated discovery of interpretable models of animal behavior 🪰🐀🕵️‍♀️ that take the form of Python programs 🐍 See below for a summary of key results by @pcastr.bsky.social!

Pablo Samuel Castro@pcastr.bsky.social · last yr.

Can LLMs be used to discover interpretable models of human and animal behavior?🤔 Turns out: yes! Thrilled to share our latest preprint where we used FunSearch to automatically discover symbolic cognitive models of behavior. 1/12

It's finally out! Visual experience orthogonalizes visual cortical responses Training in a visual task changes V1 tuning curves in odd ways. This effect is explained by a simple convex transformation. It orthogonalizes the population, making it easier to decode. 10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115235

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12

Eleanor Maguire, who died 4 January at age 54, pioneered the famous London taxi-driver study and naturalistic approaches for studying spatial and episodic memory in people. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/memory/remem...

Stellar new work lead by the inimitable James Whittington in Neuron that develops a new theory unifying episodic and working memory and explains diverse hippocampal and prefrontal data: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... w/Will Dorrell, @behrenstimb.bsky.social Mohamedy El Gaby

A tale of two algorithms: Structured slots explain prefrontal sequence memory and are unified with hippocampal cognitive maps

The algorithm of the prefrontal working memory system on sequence memory tasks is not well understood, whereas it is well understood for the hippocampal episodic memory system. This work shows a mathematical duality between working and episodic sequence memory. This leads to a computational understanding of sequence working memory—as structured activity slots. This theory algorithmically explains recurrent neural network (RNN) and prefrontal representations during sequence memory tasks.

cell.com

New brief report now out in Hippocampus! We used functional molecular imaging to ask if activity sparsity in the hippocampus (dorsal to ventral DG, CA3 and CA1) depends on memory task performed. Turns out the pattern is identical across tasks! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #NeuroSky 🧠🧪

Sparsity of Population Activity in the Hippocampus Is Task‐Invariant Across the Trisynaptic Circuit and Dorsoventral Axis

Evidence from neurophysiological and genetic studies demonstrates that activity sparsity—the proportion of neurons that are active at a given time in a population—systematically varies across the can...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Our latest preprint has landed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Fantastic work from @laurenb29.bsky.social and Will de Cothi showing how many of the cell types associated with subiculum (e.g. boundary vector cells, corner cells) can be understood as successor features. TLDR: SUB not CA1 is the SR

Unifying Subicular Function: A Predictive Map Approach

The successor representation has emerged as a powerful model for understanding mammalian navigation and memory; explaining the spatial coding properties of hippocampal place cells and entorhinal grid ...

biorxiv.org

Wicked new pre-print from @atkeinath.bsky.social More evidence for a unifying predictive framework of cognitive mapping in the mouse brain! Also first time I have seen reliable between subject differences in maps over protracted time. Nicely done!!

Alexandra Keinath@atkeinath.bsky.social · 2y ago

Super excited to share our first preprint of work from the lab! We monitor and manipulate the CA1 representation of mice exploring a multicompartment environment to contrast geometric vs. predictive theories of cognitive mapping. TLDR: All signs point to a predictive theory! tinyurl.com/yeyv5p3x

The Dept. of Computing Science at the University of Alberta is hiring! The new hires in AI will be nominated for a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. We have 3 TT positions: AI/ML/DL Theory: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post... AI + SWE: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post... Systems: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...

What are the brain’s “real” tuning curves? Our new preprint "SIMPL: Scalable and hassle-free optimisation of neural representations from behaviour” argues that existing techniques for latent variable discovery are lacking. We suggest a much simpl-er way to do things. 1/21🧵

How can biology teach us to design better AI?🤔 Our new paper, w Mike @drmichaellevin.bsky.social "Bio-inspired AI: Integrating Biological Complexity," explores how biological principles like adaptability, context-dependence, and hierarchical processing can inspire the next generation of AI. 🧵👇1/n

Want to be part of the NeuroAI community CSHL ? Applications are open for outstanding graduate students in Artificial Intelligence to spend the summer at CSHL as NeuroAI Interns. Deadline: Dec 10th, 2024. Please spread the word! www.schooljobs.com/careers/cshl... @cshlaboratory.bsky.social

Psyched that my postdoc work w @markbrandonlab.bsky.social + @atkeinath.bsky.social is now in Neuron! TL/DR: remapping in CA1 has a representational structure that is reliable across brains, and we use this representation to test models of cognitive maps. #NeuroSky #NeuroAI 🧪🧠 tinyurl.com/4juhmad8

Identifying representational structure in CA1 to benchmark theoretical models of cognitive mapping

Decades of theoretical and empirical work have suggested the hippocampus instantiates some form of a cognitive map. Yet, tests of competing theories h…

tinyurl.com

Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7

Hidden state inference requires abstract contextual representations in the ventral hippocampus

The ability to use subjective, latent contextual representations to influence decision-making is crucial for everyday life. The hippocampus is hypothesized to bind together otherwise abstract combinat...

science.org

Our new paper in @natureportfolio.bsky.social shows entorhinal grid cells adapt their representations to a new environment in one-shot and derives a model that fuses landmarks & motion to *predict* the detailed grid rep *before* the mouse enters the new environment! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One-shot entorhinal maps enable flexible navigation in novel environments - Nature

How the navigational system of the brain constructs spatial maps that require both rapid changes and representational accuracy is explored.

nature.com

Registration for #COSYNE2025 is now open! www.cosyne.org/registration #neuroscience #NeuroAI

I am recruiting graduate students for my lab @mcgillu.bsky.social for admission in Fall 2025! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

I am and have been fascinated with how memories are formed and stored. A big challenge, not unique to memory, is synthesizing concepts across scales of anaylsis - from molecules to computation. Here I try to distill how we can move forward in understanding memories. Thanks to all the contributors!

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 2y ago

@jasonsynaptic.bsky.social asks eight scientists to weigh in on what makes memories last—dynamic ensembles or static synapses? www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

One more time!! Presenting my final postdoc project with @markbrandonlab at U29 from 8–12 this morning! Come say hi!! #SfN24

I am thrilled to share that I have accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta in the Department of Psychology to start next summer, and will be accepting graduate student applications (due December 1st)! @Psych_UAlberta sites.psych.ualberta.ca/NMSLab/

New short but sweet paper on a topic I love - sparse representation in the hippocampus! Using functional molecular imaging, we found that activity sparsity is highly conserved across memory tasks. Feedback is welcome! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sparsity of population activity in the hippocampus is task-invariant across the trisynaptic circuit and dorsoventral axis

bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

biorxiv.org