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Laurence Hunt

@lhuntneuro.bsky.social

Cognitive Neuroscientist at University of Oxford; Tutorial Fellow in Psychology at St John's College.

158 Posts4329 Follower636 Folgt
Leyla Isik@lisik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Also if you're at #CCN2026 come chat with me about Minds, Machines, and Brains @mmb-journal.bsky.social A new journal we are launching with @mitpress.bsky.social with my co-EICs Kendrick Kay & Ellie Pavlick, and the rest of the wonderful editorial board: direct.mit.edu/mmb/pages/ed...

Editorial Information | Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press

Editorial Information | Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press Editorial Information All inquiries should be directed to mindsmachinesandbrains@gmail.com Co-Editors in Chief Leyla Isik ...

direct.mit.edu

Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB)@mmb-journal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

Laurence Hunt@lhuntneuro.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New MIT Press journal for the intersection between cognitive science, neuroscience and machine learning research. Looking forward to being involved in this!

Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB)@mmb-journal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

Wanjun Lin@wanjunlin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Very happy to share this work on a preprint! Coauthored with @mikebrowning.bsky.social @Erdem Pulcu @lhuntneuro.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... How do we learn when rewards and punishments change independently—and how does this go awry in anxiety and depression?

Valence-specific representation of uncertainty in the anterior cingulate is impaired in those with affective symptoms

The ability to seek reward and avoid punishment is a fundamental survival instinct. In natural environments, however, the statistics of rewards and punishments can change independently of one another....

biorxiv.org

Laurence Hunt@lhuntneuro.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This has been a super-fun project. Can modern LLMs/LRMs learnto play simple video-games from scratch? Can we outperform existing models of these tasks when predicting fMRI data? In the words of @botoscsabi.bsky.social , "the short answer is yes and yes". If you want the long answer, see below :-)

Botos Csabi@botoscsabi.bsky.social · 4mo ago

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...

Laurence Hunt@lhuntneuro.bsky.social · 5mo ago

***4-year Career Development Research Fellowship in Psychology now available at Oxford!*** Open to all areas of Psychology, including Cognitive/Behavioural Neuroscience. PhD in last three years, or be about to submit (some exceptions apply). Deadline: 21st May. www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/vac...

Career Development Research Fellowship

Career Development Research Fellowship in Psychology for full-time research offered by St John’s College to early career researchers who have recently completed or are close to completion of a doctora...

sjc.ox.ac.uk

Laurence Hunt@lhuntneuro.bsky.social · 5mo ago

***4-year Career Development Research Fellowship in Psychology now available at Oxford!*** Open to all areas of Psychology, including Cognitive/Behavioural Neuroscience. PhD in last three years, or be about to submit (some exceptions apply). Deadline: 21st May. www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/vac...

Career Development Research Fellowship

Career Development Research Fellowship in Psychology for full-time research offered by St John’s College to early career researchers who have recently completed or are close to completion of a doctora...

sjc.ox.ac.uk

Sebastijan Veselic@sebves.bsky.social · 6mo ago

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Value-based decision-making can be conceptualized as navigation within a cognitive map of choice values. During choice, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) compositionally builds cognitive maps...

shorturl.at

Ali Mahmoodi@alimahmoodi.bsky.social · 7mo ago

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 · 7mo 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...

Edvard I Moser@edvardmoser.bsky.social · 8mo ago

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)

Attention-like regulation of theta sweeps in the brain's spatial navigation circuit

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

biorxiv.org

Tobias Hauser@tobiasuhauser.bsky.social · last yr.

📢 We are hiring! 📢 For our @wellcometrust.bsky.social grant on information gathering biases in #OCD and #Schizophrenia, we are looking for a Postdoc in Computational Modelling, supervised by Peter Dayan and myself. Interested? See all the details in the job advert here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application

ALT: a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application

media.tenor.com

Julia Bottesini@juliabottesini.com · last yr.

Do you agree PsyArXiv is a valuable service? Then please consider joining the PsyArXiv moderation team to keep it that way (more info in the link below)! There's a 1-hour training session this coming Monday, Aug 18 at 1pm ET, and the minimum commitment is just 1h/month! (reposting also helps :))

Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS)@improvingpsych.org · last yr.

PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky

Laurence Hunt@lhuntneuro.bsky.social · last yr.

Getting involved with CCN organisation was one of the best things I did to get to know a wide network of amazing, friendly, international and interdisciplinary colleagues. Strongly recommend! And @neurograce.bsky.social will be an awesome co-chair :-)

Grace Lindsay@neurograce.bsky.social · last yr.

The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!

Erin Rich@erinlrich.bsky.social · last yr.

Happy to have some good science news - our new study with @aqperkins.bsky.social is out in @plosbiology.org! dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Orbitofrontal cortex computes gaze-dependent comparisons between attributes rather than integrated values

When choosing between options with multiple attributes, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is thought to integrate across those attributes, aiding in value comparisons. This study shows in monkeys that OF...

dx.plos.org

Laurence Hunt@lhuntneuro.bsky.social · last yr.

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

PLOS Biology@plosbiology.org · last yr.

How do humans navigate unfamiliar environments? @denislan.bsky.social @lhuntneuro.bsky.social @summerfieldlab.bsky.social show that humans & deep meta-learning networks combine ‘vector-based’ & ‘transition-based’ strategies for flexible navigation in similar ways @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/45uSwNm

Task design and experimental set-up. Top left: underlying structure of the 8 × 8 grid, unseen by participants. Every state is represented by an image of an object, and these objects and their positions change on every trial. Top right: schematic diagram of the ‘map reading’ phase of each trial. Participants see a top–down view of the grid with objects obscured and successively click on blue squares to reveal ‘landmark’ objects at the location. After 16 clicks have been completed, a yellow square appears. Clicking on the yellow square reveals the ‘goal’ object for the trial. Bottom: schematic diagram of the navigation phase of each trial. Participants start in a random, previously unobserved location and are tasked with navigating to the ‘goal’ object they had just learnt about (displayed at the top). They can navigate in two ways. First, they could choose a direction to travel in by clicking on the corresponding arrow (highlighted yellow). This is analogous to using a ‘vector-based’ strategy. Alternatively, they could choose an adjacent state to travel to by clicking on one of the associated images (displayed in a random order; highlighted blue). This corresponds to using a ‘transition-based’ navigation strategy.