Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊 Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules. Led by Dammy Onih! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Now out in @nature.com: Biological insights into schizophrenia from ancestrally diverse populations. @sinaibrain.bsky.social @sinaigenetics.bsky.social cs.bsky.social @timbigdeli.bsky.social #CDNeurogenomics #MountSinaiPsych #MillionVeteranProgram and many collaborators Read: rdcu.be/eZ7he

Biological insights into schizophrenia from ancestrally diverse populations

Nature - Genome-wide association studies incorporating data for populations of African ancestry provide an expanded view of the genetic basis of schizophrenia, which has previously been studied...

rdcu.be

Rates of ADHD have been rising quickly over the past few decades, for reasons that are not entirely clear — a mystery that underscores how much we still have to learn about the condition. go.nature.com/49TQWG5

ADHD is on the rise, but why?

The more we learn, the less we seem to understand this condition.

go.nature.com

I’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward. Full text here: rdcu.be/eY5nh

All theory is wrong until verified by data. Greatly indebted to @mhyaghoubi.bsky.social, @markbrandonlab.bsky.social, @douglasresearch.bsky.social for finding the hippocampus encoding reward prediction! Grateful to my advisor @cpehlevan.bsky.social, @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social. #RL #hippocampus

Nature@nature.com · 7mo ago

Nature research paper: Predictive coding of reward in the hippocampus go.nature.com/49mB13V

𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻-𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗽𝗵𝘆𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆: 𝗟𝗼𝗰𝗮𝗹, 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝘅, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Excellent review paper about reactive and anticipatory processes. #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

I am extremely grateful to be awarded the National University of Singapore (NUS) Development Grant, and to be a Young NUS Fellow! Look forward to collaborating with the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine on exciting projects. This is my first grant and hopefully many more to come! #NUS #NeuroAI

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it! Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵 New paper! We studied depression symptoms and goal-directed decisions under uncertainty @shiyiliang.bsky.social, with @evanrussek.bsky.social & @robbrutledge.bsky.social Surprisingly, we found that apathy–anhedonia was linked to enhanced goal-directed behavior. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Not just for AI but these theories can improve our understanding of biological networks too!

Simons Foundation@simonsfoundation.org · 12mo ago

Our new Simons Collaboration on the Physics of Learning and Neural Computation will develop powerful tools from #physics, #math, computer science and theoretical #neuroscience to understand how large neural networks learn, compute, scale, reason and imagine: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/08/18/s...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

trying this with GPT-5 and charting new frontiers in gaslighting

Tomer Ullman@tomerullman.bsky.social · 2y ago

thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" (more examples below)

Wanted to share a new version (much cleaner!) of a preprint on how connectivity structure shapes collective dynamics in nonlinear RNNs. Neural circuits have highly non-iid connectivity (e.g., rapidly decaying singular values, structured singular-vector overlaps), unlike classical random RNN models.

Connectivity structure and dynamics of nonlinear recurrent neural networks

Studies of the dynamics of nonlinear recurrent neural networks often assume independent and identically distributed couplings, but large-scale connectomics data indicate that biological neural circuit...

arxiv.org

1 proceeding and 2 extended abstracts at Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN) Conference 2025! Short summaries and links are in the thread. Look forward to the discussions! #CCN25

The emergence of NeuroAI: bridging neuroscience and artificial intelligence — a Comment article by Sadra Sadeh & Claudia Clopath @sdrsd.bsky.social @clopathlab.bsky.social ‪ #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share that our paper is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social (dlvr.it/TM9zJ8). Our perception isn't a perfect mirror of the world. It's often biased by our expectations and beliefs. How do these biases unfold over time, and what shapes their trajectory? A summary thread. (1/13)

Attractor dynamics of working memory explain a concurrent evolution of stimulus-specific and decision-consistent biases in visual estimation

People exhibit biases when perceiving features of the world, shaped by both external stimuli and prior decisions. By tracking behavioral, neural, and mechanistic markers of stimulus- and decision-rela...

dlvr.it

In neuroscience, we often try to understand systems by analyzing their representations — using tools like regression or RSA. But are these analyses biased towards discovering a subset of what a system represents? If you're interested in this question, check out our new commentary! Thread:

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online: www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han... Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

Coming March 17, 2026! Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.

How can we test theories in neuroscience? Take a variable predicted to be important by the theory. It could fail to be observed because it's represented in some nonlinear, even distributed way. Or it could be observed but not be causal because the network is a reservoir. How can we deal with this?

This summer my lab's journal club somewhat unintentionally ended up reading papers on a theme of "more naturalistic computational neuroscience". I figured I'd share the list of papers here 🧵:

First #ICML2025 conference proceeding (icml.cc/virtual/2025...)! We (@frostedblakess.bsky.social, @jzv.bsky.social, @cpehlevan.bsky.social) developed a simple model to better understand state representation learning dynamics in both artificial and biological intelligent systems!

State representation learning in the hippocampus?

Kempner Institute at Harvard University@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · last yr.

Monday 4/28 at #ICLR2025! Submission: openreview.net/forum?id=Qcv... 'A Model of Place Field Reorganization During Reward Maximization' @mgkumar138.bsky.social, Blake Bordelon, Jacob A Zavatone-Veth, @CPehlevan.bsky.social #ML #neuroscience

I'm heading back to Singapore for ICLR25! Hit me up for discussions or where to find good food! #neuroai #home

Kempner Institute at Harvard University@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · last yr.

Are you at #ICLR2025? See the lineup of Kempner Institute presenters and check out their work! #ML #AI

New preprint! We trained an RNN using RL to solve a decision making task used to characterize suboptimal decision making by Schizophrenic patients. First project exploring comp psych models, thanks to @adam-manoogian.bsky.social @shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social @bqian.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social

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

Neurocomputational underpinnings of suboptimal beliefs in recurrent neural network-based agents https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.13.642273v1

I am speaking at COSYNE 2025. Please check out my talk if you're attending the event! #cosyne2025 #cosyne25

Our Model on Place Field Reorganization with @frostedblakess.bsky.social, @jzv.bsky.social, @cpehlevan.bsky.social has been accepted at COSYNE! Look forward to sharing it with everyone! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A Model of Place Field Reorganization During Reward Maximization

When rodents learn to navigate in a novel environment, a high density of place fields emerges at reward locations, fields elongate against the trajectory, and individual fields change spatial selectiv...

biorxiv.org

Our preprint with @frostedblakess.bsky.social, @jzv.bsky.social, @cpehlevan.bsky.social is out! We develop a simple reinforcement learning model that recapitulates 3 disparate hippocampal dynamics. With ablation studies, these representations improve the speed and flexibility of policy learning.