Psyched to announce our COSYNE workshop on social behaviors (Mar 17th, Cascais). We have a stellar lineup of speakers on topics from animal cooperation and aggression to the social dynamics of LLM agents.

Co-organized with Libby Zhang (Allen Institute + UW).
cosyne-social-behavior.github.io

Agouti integrates environmental cues to regulate paternal behaviour - Nature Expression of agouti signalling protein in neurons in the medial preoptic area is increased by group housing and negatively associated with care, and overexpression of Agouti reduces care and enhances...

Why are some males caring toward infants while others are neglectful or abusive? I'm so pleased to share work that my colleagues and I @princeton.edu have just published @nature.com (an explanatory thread to follow!) (1/8)

The visual world is composed of objects, and those objects are composed of features. But do VLMs exploit this compositional structure when processing multi-object scenes? In our 🆒🆕 #ICLR2026 paper, we find they do – via emergent symbolic mechanisms for visual binding. 🧵👇

Our paper on data constrained RNN that generalize to optogenetic perturbations now citable on eLife:
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Want to track the dynamics of estrogen in the brain across long periods of time? New paper as part of very fun collab with team UCLA Ed Van Veen and Steph Correa! We use a specialized optical reporter and show that this is possible and actually very easy! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 We are recruiting a full-time Research Programmer to push forward several exciting machine learning projects in the lab!

Work on computational behavior and joint neural/behavior models. Start date flexible, can be a pre-grad-school position or longer term.

recruiting2.ultipro.com/SCR1003TSRI/...

Tatiana Engel explains how to connect high-dimensional neural circuitry with low-dimensional cognitive functions Neuroscientists have long sought to understand the relationship between structure and function in the vast connectivity and activity patterns in the brain. Engel discusses her modeling approach to…

In this episode of @braininspired.bsky.social, @engeltatiana.bsky.social discusses her modeling approach to discovering the connections between structure and function in the vast connectivity and activity patterns in the brain.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

🚨Our work was accepted to the @neuripsconf.bsky.social : Data on the Brain & Mind workshop!🧠🦾"Massively Parallel Imitation Learning of Mouse Forelimb Musculoskeletal Reaching Dynamics" @talmo.bsky.social @eazim.bsky.social
An imitation learning framework for modeling mouse forelimb control. 1/3

How do brain areas control each other? 🧠🎛️

✨In our NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight paper, we introduce a data-driven framework to answer this question using deep learning, nonlinear control, and differential geometry.🧵⬇️

Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, Editor-in-Chief, now reporting for duty. 🫡

Catch me at the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Booth (3928) today and tomorrow from 2-3 pm if you want to chat about your manuscript or what JUNE is up to.

#SfN2025 #SfN25 @sfn.org

Talmo Lab is at @sfn.org! Come check out our latest work!

#neuroskyence #neurosky #SfN2025 #SfN25

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7

Single-unit activations confer inductive biases for emergent circuit solutions to cognitive tasks - Nature Machine Intelligence Recurrent neural networks are widely used to model brain dynamics. Tolmachev and Engel show that single-unit activation functions influence task solutions that emerge in trained networks, raising the ...

Excited to share our new work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social!

RNNs are often used to explore how the brain may solve specific tasks. We show that, depending on the architecture, RNNs find distinct circuit solutions, behaving differently when exposed to novel stimuli.
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

A study led by Cina Aghamohammadi is now out in ‪@natcomms.nature.com‬! We developed a mathematical framework for partitioning spiking variability, which revealed that spiking irregularity is nearly invariant for each neuron and decreases along the cortical hierarchy.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Stoked to share our new review on why neuroendocrinology needs a systems lens and why hormones should matter to systems neuroscience. It’s time for serious cross-talk!

Check out this newest preprint from our lab 🥳 Multi-fiber + behavior quantification for the win

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/MABe-mouse-behavior-detection

And we are live!

Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️

Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions!

www.kaggle.com/competitions...

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

#Cosyne2026 is now open for business!

Show us what you got both for the main meeting & workshop proposals 🧠🥳🧠🥳🧠

Super excited to share the first cooperative foraging paradigm in freely interacting mouse pairs! Stable leader and follower roles emerge spontaneously and predict learning. Well-trained mice show stereotyped, role-specific “behavioral motifs” absent in naive animals (1/5)
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Excited to share our new preprint on the brain-wide organization of intrinsic timescales at single neuron resolution. Work w/ @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social, @intlbrainlab.bsky.social, Anna Levina, @engeltatiana.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We're Hiring. Assistant professor in the area of human cognitive neuroscience. Princeton University shield logo subbrand lockup with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and Dept of Psychology logos. Background photo = PNI and psychology building (Peretsman Scully Hall).

We're hiring! The Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology invite applications for a joint hire Assistant Professor in human cognitive neuroscience 🧠

Review of applications begin Oct 15. More details here: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Come work with us! @princetonneuro.bsky.social and the Department of Psychology at Princeton University are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of human cognitive neuroscience, to be hired jointly in Psychology and Neuroscience: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

A hypothalamic circuit that modulates feeding and parenting behaviours - Nature Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of mouse hypothalamus and behavioural experiments show that specific hypothalamic networks regulate conflicting feeding versus parenting behaviours of female mice.

How do animals decide if they should forage for food or stay home to take care of newborn offspring? Whose needs come first? For my PhD work now out in Nature, we examined how hunger and parenting neurons interact and are reshaped postpartum in mice 🧵⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Proposal recommended for funding! Which means we have a fresh, 3-year-funded position available for a computational postdoc interested in studying dynamics of social interactions in rats, with simultaneous Neuropixels data to follow 🐀🐀🐀

Proper job ad pending, but email me if interested!

(1/7) New preprint from Rajan lab! 🧠🤖
@ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social & Riley Simmons-Edler show–through cog sci, neuro & ethology–how an AI agent with fewer ‘neurons’ than an insect can forage, find safety & dodge predators in a virtual world. Here's what we built

Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06981

📢🚨I’m elated to share that I’ll be starting as a tenure-track 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿 👩🏻‍🏫 in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego this July! ☀️ @ucsandiego.bsky.social 1/

#ucsd #newprofessor #womeninSTEM

“Like a group of skiers descending a mountain, each [neuron] prefers a slightly different path, but all are shaped by the same slope,” says PNI's @engeltatiana.bsky.social‬ on her lab’s new ‪@nature.com‬ study revealing how the brain makes decisions.

📰: pni.princeton.edu/news/2025/al...

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall!

My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵