Anatomical representation of Braak stages in Alzheimer’s disease (with a focus on stages I to III associated with preclinical AD) and spatial navigation computations.

⚠️New review straight out of the oven!
"Spatial navigation in preclinical Alzheimer's disease: A review"
arxiv.org/abs/2603.23082

We focus on spatial navigation as a sensitive cognitive marker in preclinical AD, compiling evidence from cognitively unimpaired individuals with positive AD biomarkers.

Thanks for the feature @ucllifesciences.bsky.social! I plan to let the fame go straight to my head 🧠👩‍🔬

Really interesting from the Burgess stable — theta sweeps in entorhinal cortex show a dorsoventral gradient, with different spatial scales coordinated at different frequencies. Nice work @zilong-ji.bsky.social @neilburgess10.bsky.social 👏

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2026.03.08.710351v1

Thanks Caswell! Happy to see this out.
Recent interesting work from Vollan et al @azvollan.bsky.social showed that the decoded locations from grid cell activity sweep out in a left-right alternative way across successive theta cycles, steered by an “internal direction” signal in parasubiculum.

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What drives the sequential emergence of spatial neurons in developing rats? In our ICLR 2026 paper, we show how changes in movement statistics drive spatial tuning. Our model replicates experimental timelines and predicts novel conjunctive tuning maturation.
doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.30.696864

Disrupted hippocampal replay is associated with reduced offline map stabilization in an Alzheimer’s mouse model Shipley et al. show that spatial memory deficits in an Alzheimer’s mouse model are associated with place cell instability and degraded reactivations in rest. Although reactivation rates are preserved,...

So happy to finally see this out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We found that disrupted replay structure in an AD model was linked to reduced place cell stability and more repetitive behaviour on a radial maze 🧠 @abrate.bsky.social @caswell.bsky.social #neurosky

tinyurl.com/yx52vzjd

How the brain's 'memory replay' goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease Memory dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to impairment in how the brain replays our recent experiences while we are resting, according to a new study in mice by UCL scientists.

Memory dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to impairment in how the brain replays our recent experiences while we are resting, according to a new study in mice led by Dr Sarah Shipley @shipleysj.bsky.social and Prof Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social @ucllifesciences.bsky.social

Books of the Year 2025 Voting Form School Reading List Children's Books of the Year 2025. To take part, vote for one book in each category and press 'submit' at the end of this form. For more information, book synopses and purchasing ...

Wooo! Exciting news - Inside Your Brain - the children's neuroscience book I wrote with @lucyannunwin.bsky.social has been listed in the 2025 Children's book of the year shortlist.

Please vote for us:

tinyurl.com/yhr8vawe

(some of those other books look amazing too)

Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky

1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Open Access
journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019).

The renamed:

Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

Huge thanks to my collaborators on this: @caswell.bsky.social , @abrate.bsky.social, Robin Hayman and Dennis Chan (who aren’t on here).

Place fields were less stable in the AD mice (this also improved across days). The stability of place cells correlated with the memory performance!

5/5

Place cell stability decreased more rapidly in AD mice than WT’s. Importantly, stability increased in session 2 (following rest) in WT but not AD mice.

4/ 5

MUA rate in the rest between sessions was not different between AD and WT mice. BUT – recruitment of cells to MUAs, and the structure within MUAs, was reduced in the AD mice!

Both recruitment to MUAs and structure within MUAs were predictive of place cell stability.

3/5

APP NL-G-F mice (which avoid APP overexpression) had decreased memory performance in a radial-arm maze task.

Compared to WT’s, the AD mice were more likely to return to arms they had already visited in trial, rather than visiting unique arms. But they did improve across days!

2/5

Disordered Hippocampal Reactivations Predict Spatial Memory Deficits in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer's Disease Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterised by progressive memory decline associated with hippocampal degeneration. However, the specific physiological mechanisms underlying hippocampal dysfunction in A...

Excited to share that our preprint is out!
doi.org/10.1101/2024...

The structure of place cell reactivations was disordered in AD mice compared to WT! This was predictive of reduced place cell stability and memory performance on a radial-arm maze task.

Here are a few details:

1/5🧵

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 ...

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

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...

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

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🧵