Brainwide Representation of Navigation Enny recorded >20k neurons across forebrain and midbrain while mice navigated 1D VR. She found that every region encodes spatial position! Hippocampal formation stands out only in uniformity of the representation. But visual cortex beats it in precision...

Enny van Beest@ennyvb.bsky.social · 15h ago

Textbook: tracking position during navigation is primarily the job of the hippocampus. Recent findings suggest a more complicated story. Recording >20k neurons brainwide, we indeed find spatial representations in every region! With @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @carandinilab.net

How fast can mice learn complex mazes? With @mameister4.bsky.social we reveal memory, generalization, latent learning, and remote credit assignment of mice in the Manhattan Maze. Do mice born without a cortex or hippocampus have them too? Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Rapid spatial cognition in mice, with and without neocortex and hippocampus

Rapid learning, memory, and generalization are often attributed to circuits of the neocortex and hippocampus, but their specific role remains unclear. To examine these cognitive abilities together in ...

biorxiv.org

Pouring a cup of coffee looks trivial. It isn’t. Humans effortlessly control nonlinear liquid dynamics across different vessels and speeds—while robots still struggle. In our new preprint, we ask how the human motor system solves this everyday control problem. 1/5

Hey, we’ve been studying mnemonic chunking in🐒! With @fkchiang89.bsky.social Here’s the rundown: 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Compression as a neural mechanism of mnemonic chunking in prefrontal cortex

Chiang and Rich show that macaques spontaneously chunk spatial targets in a self-ordered working memory task. dlPFC neurons compress chunked targets into lower-dimensional representations that are shi...

cell.com

Excited to share that our paper on explainable AI for autonomous driving is out today in @nature.com! Super proud to have been part of this amazing collaboration between Motional and MIT! Details in the 🧵

TMLR has refocused its acceptance criteria to place more emphasis on clear writing. Read more in this blog post: medium.com/@TmlrOrg/inc...

Increasing Emphasis on Clear Writing in Acceptance Criteria

Three things are true today:

medium.com

Our task-switching paper is now out at Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol... We find that that our brains reset to a task-neutral state between trials, providing flexibility when the upcoming task is uncertain. RNNs also learn this strategy, but only when trained to switch tasks.

Our new paper is out in Nature Communications! 🎶🧠✨ If you're interested in how the brain represents meaning evoked by music, check it out. Shout out to my Princeton team for making this happen!🚀 @jalon.bsky.social, @margulisa.bsky.social, Karen Christianson, Cara Turnbull, Grace Simmons, Uri Hasson

Itamar Jalon@jalon.bsky.social · 2w ago

Play people instrumental music they've never heard, and they independently imagine the same story. Play them that story in words instead, and the same brain regions light up in the same pattern. Our new paper is out today in @natcomms.nature.com

This seems to be the Summer of Traveling Waves. Traveling-wave transcranial alternating current stimulation (twtACS) causally links neural timing to cognitive function doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #neuroscience

You'd think people prefer the simplest explanation of an uncertain world — Occam's razor. Our data says no, across 2 modalities, 2 tasks, 8 experiments: people often perceive illusory structure that isn't there and prefer moderate complexity. Out now in Nature Comms! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Traveling waves help shrinks the problem of organizing networks down to a manageable, lower-dimensional picture. doi.org/10.1016/j.ph... #neuroscience

Extended category training shifted category signals from frontal to sensory cortex, moving processing out of the brain's bottlenecked control system and into faster, more automatic circuits. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN... #neuroscience

Extensive Experience Remodels Neural Task Circuitry to Escape the Frontal Bottleneck and Increase Automaticity of Categorization

Abstract. Object category learning is a foundational cognitive process. Most human category learning studies involve brief paradigms lasting a few hours and show increased shape tuning in visual areas...

doi.org

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/...

The paper might be hard to penetrate for some that are not familiar with the mathematics/physics machinery. But what this means for neuroscience (and why NeuroAI needs it)? See the companion that explains and unwraps it for computational/systems neuroscientists. 👇 neurovium.science/posts/pblog-...

Nima Dehghani@neurovium.bsky.social · last mo.

Week 4 of summer of papers! Here we go! 📣📷 📜 The central question: when does memory in matter become autonomous computation? 1/n 👇🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2607.23902

Do RL agents really need to replan from scratch for every new goal? Why do rodents "preplay" goals they haven't pursued? We think these questions share a candidate answer.

How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)

Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...

nature.com

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

The brain uses a fixed set of building blocks and flexibly recombines them, allowing adapting to new tasks. Learning stabilizes temporal activity but not neuronal selectivity in prefrontal cortex doi.org/10.64898/202... #neuroscience

Learning stabilizes temporal activity but not neuronal selectivity in prefrontal cortex

Intelligent behavior requires neural representations to change with new demands while preserving learned structure. The prefrontal cortex is central to this ability, but the mechanisms are unclear. Here, we tracked medial prefrontal neurons for months as mice learned an association task with successive rule switches. Learning progressively stabilized when individual neurons were active during a trial, but not what task variables they responded to. Neurons repeatedly gained, lost, or changed selectivity even after their activity profile had stabilized. We developed Sparse Tensor Component Analysis to show that, rather than reflecting random drift, dynamic single-neuron selectivity arose through rule-dependent recombination of a fixed set of task representations. Thus, learning established a stable temporal scaffold in the prefrontal cortex within which neurons participated flexibly in different representations. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, https://ror.org/0472cxd90, 758032 Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, https://ror.org/018mejw64, JA 1999/6-1, JA 1999/8-1 ONE Munich Strategy Forum, N/A

doi.org

This is awesome!!

Dan Levenstein@dlevenstein.bsky.social · last mo.

Things my wife sends me en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

"Replay occurs in the dorsal striatum during offline consolidation of a procedural memory in mice" - even with total hippocampal lesions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42493550/ It looks like memory replay is a general capability of the brain - not a special feature of the hippocampus!

“We humans tend to overestimate how special we are” www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/s...

Monkeys Understand Shapes in Almost the Same Way as Humans (Gift Article)

Our geometric intuition, long considered something that sets us apart, seems to be shared with other primates.

nytimes.com

Neuroscientists have long wondered exactly how brain activity relates to blood flow. A new paper from the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain suggests the answer lies in a hidden balance between two opposing groups of neurons. Read more: https://bit.ly/3QX90to #science #neuroscience

Out today on @nature.com! Connecting neural specialization, population geometry, and their functional implications across the cortical hierarchy. So grateful for this beautiful and fun collaboration with @shuqiw.bsky.social, S Muscinelli, L Paninski, and @stefanofusi.bsky.social!

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

Hippocampal engrams configure prefrontal context representations to guide flexible decisions Impressive combo of methods to manipulate and record this process: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hippocampal engrams configure prefrontal context representations to guide flexible decisions

Flexible behavior requires using past experiences to configure cortical computations to suit current task demands. A central question in neuroscience is how memory representations control such reconfi...

biorxiv.org

Out now in eLife, our new and improved paper on Attention and planning. Here, we explore how attention acts like an inductive bias that selects relevant information on which to plan. 📍🗺️👀 (1/5) elifesciences.org/articles/108... @smfleming.bsky.social

How attention simplifies mental representations for planning

Spatial attention controls the information people become aware of and, in turn, incorporate into simplified perceptual representations for use in multi-step planning.

elifesciences.org

Tired of doom-scrolling bluesky? Try mitpuzzles.com!

Sam Cheyette@samcheyette.bsky.social · 2mo ago

are you a puzzle-enjoyer, or would you like to become one? try out a game or two at mitpuzzles.com! we're trying to figure out the factors that separate novice from expert problem solving, and what changes with experience, using self-motivated puzzle solving

Our work on goal-directed theta sweeps is out! We found two different types of theta sweeps in the rat hippocampus. During random foraging, left-right alternating sweeps dominated (Vollan, 25). However, during memory-guided navigation sweeps pointing to hidden goal locations emerged with learning.

For a long time I felt like there was a hesitation in neuroscience to ascribe anything like a planning function to the various "replay" events we see in the hippocampus, but I think this is rapidly changing. Here's another new entry in human epilepsy patients: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪

Human hippocampal ripples coordinate planning sequences and compositional representations in neocortex - Nature Neuroscience

Human hippocampal ripples and replay interact with the prefrontal cortex to update mental representations online, letting the brain compositionally combine familiar elements in new ways for flexible p...

nature.com

Lionel Naccache and I wrote a commentary on this work from a neuroscience perspective. You can read it here : unicog.org/a-global-wor...

Do people solve hard problems by first building a mental model, then searching for the best solution? With @gershbrain.bsky.social, our new manuscript suggests a different route: people often start by retrieving cached solutions, and scaffold representations around them. osf.io/preprints/ps...