New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.
New preprint!
Prefrontal brain-to-brain synchrony during human group hunting: Evidence from fNIRS hyperscanning
Heroic work from @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social and team
fNIRS & minecraft combined to reveal PFC synchrony during human group hunting
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New preprint! 🧠
How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli?
By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis
"From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We’ve got an exciting new thing to share! We have causal evidence (using TMR) that memory reactivation during sleep promotes abstract understanding of underlying structure, allowing transfer learning in a new domain with zero superficial feature overlap with the learned one.
Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit.
You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?
Academic friends,
It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region.
A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions.
Please read & sign if you agree:
sites.google.com/view/protect...
#IranWar
Happy to share some of the work done in our lab in this mega-thread of nine (!) papers/preprints (+1 sneak peek) from the last six months. Here goes (in no particular order)! **Please repost** and let me know if you need access to any of the PDFs! #sleeppeeps #sleep #neuroscience 1/12
How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?
Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as events become familiar. Slow-timescale structure predicts memory.
Excited to share this work w/ Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!
New paper! Out now in Neuropsychologia: “Sparsity and memory constraints interact with training sequence to bias learning of associative maps” with @dalezhou.bsky.social*, @kwcooper.bsky.social, @lovecrabmeat.bsky.social, and @aaronbornstein.bsky.social. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mipv6TBG9...
🧵:
🚨NEW PREPRINT (w/ Fleming Peck & Hongjing Lu)
"Spontaneous emergence of context-dependent statistical learning in humans and neural networks"
We are constantly predicting what will happen next. Yet the same cue can lead to different predictions depending on context.
How might this work...? 🧵1/8
out today, enjoyed writing this w/ @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social !
New lab paper! We built a new computational model that explains several disparate observations about the conditions that promote (or hinder) associative learning. Main finding is that different kinds of experience (blocked, interleaved) have opposing effect at high vs low memory capacity. 🧵 below!
New review from our group out in Nature Reviews Psychology:
Determinants of individual navigation ability
with my excellent co-author: @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social
Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7
Proud to share the lab’s first preprint, led by the fantastic @christinamaher.bsky.social! 🎉
Real-world environments are high-dimensional and noisy.
Selective attention is thought to shape the state representations that make reinforcement learning tractable.
This position is still open! Come join us!
How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories?
We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate!
Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!
Where you look next isn’t arbitrary.
In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵
what about asking your bi friends about Binocular Rivalry?
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...
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.
Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social:
tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum
@erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com
We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:
New preprint from Lindsey Tepfer (@ltjaql.bsky.social) and me! We silenced portions of internal monologues in two films to manipulate participants' access to characters' thoughts. Using ISC and RSA, we found that this aligned later neural processing of the narrative & encoding of trait impressions.
So proud of @meganspurney.bsky.social and team for this exciting new paper from my lab!
Younger adolescents' working memory performance benefits more from reward than older teens and young adults.
This occurs even though all ages report similar preferences about reward value and cognitive demand.
Very proud that this is finally out!
Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..
Excited to announce that my last project from grad school is finally out in JoCN! Accepted last fall, but if you’re a fan of formatted PDFs now is your time to strike.
Neural Reinstatement of Encoding Context Mediates the Switch between Fear and Extinction Recall
direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...
We are hiring a research specialist, to start this summer! This position would be a great fit for individuals looking to get more experience in computational and cognitive neuroscience research before applying to graduate school. #neurojobs Apply here: research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21503/r...
Final paper of my PhD 🤗
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making.
However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.
❗New Paper❗Is children's attention more like a spotlight that darts across time, or one that diffuses across many things at once? How might children's immature attention help their learning? Our Dev Sci Paper has answers! 🧵🎯
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41549519/
Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.
How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?
Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.
