Augmenting the Bayesian Brain with learned and reusable world-model components for flexible cognition https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.06.722922v1

THE NEURAL GEOMETRY SERIES The World Inside Neural Networks www.goodfire.ai/research/the...

NEW PAPER! Here, my postdoc, Biru Dudhabhate, and I review the history of one of the most famous neuroscience hypotheses, the dopamine reward prediction error, and reflect on what made it such a major advance for the field. @uabneuro.bsky.social www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...

exciting news: I will be moving to London to start my PhD at @ucl.ac.uk University College London Experimental Psychology this Fall 2026 with @meganakpeters.bsky.social 😃🥳!!! 1/2

What does it mean for cognition to be Bayesian? The view that cognition is Bayesian inference is often intended at Marr's computational level. In a new paper in Nat Rev Psych, @kaixue98.bsky.social and I formulate the "explicit-Bayes" hypothesis that lives at the algorithmic level. rdcu.be/ff1XA

In a new preprint w/ @tianqizhan.bsky.social & @smfleming.bsky.social, we developed a new measure of metacognitive bias (over/under confidence in individual decisions)! doi.org/10.31234/osf...

sounds like the best opportunity😎come join our lab👇👇

Probabilistic neural code supports metacognition in value-based decisions in the human brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.21.719717v1

How do experiences reshape our internal representations of the world? @bstaresina.bsky.social &co show that learning sequential experiences reshapes how the #brain represents what we see; a post-learning nap strengthens these predictive changes @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4dJGwMC

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.

🚨 Announcing another edition of the Metacognitive Science satellite in NYC, August 2nd 2026 (day before CCN) 🧠 🧪 Abstract submission is now open and closes May 15th! metacognitivescience.org Co-organised with @meganakpeters.bsky.social @luciecharlesneuro.bsky.social @dobyrahnev.bsky.social

happy this is finally out! 🥹 lots of hard work went into this — especially from our participants who each completed 7168 trials (!! 😮‍💨)

Check out our lab #CDS2026! Talks on early intuitions about democracy, consequences of household inequality, and cross-cultural data on intuitive beliefs about social exclusion.

The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈 Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."

Happy to share our new preprint: Uncovering the representational geometry of durations Is time represented along a single mental timeline? We combine behaviour + EEG to show that duration is organised in a richer, multidimensional space. w/ @lnalborczyk.bsky.social & @virginievanw.bsky.social

Really enjoyed writing up this article with Lavonna Mark for @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social on how internal states - like attention, arousal, or goals - can reshape our brain's map of space, helping the brain adapt navigation to what matters most. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#VSS2026 Congratulations to Ilker Yildirim, the 2026 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award recipient! 🏆 Join us Monday, May 18, at 12:30 pm for his award talk: "How to model the mind simultaneously across the computational, algorithmic, and neural levels." Details: bit.ly/4sDRWWL

When and Where: A Model Hippocampal Network Unifies Formation of Time Cells and Place Cells www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Preprint! Representations in working memory wax and wane with relevance. How does this affect what we remember later? We show that temporal expectations drive competition between items in working memory and that these neural dynamics predict long-term forgetting.

We have an exciting series of talks coming up this semester. Starting on April 22nd, Wednesday's 6pm Berlin time! Join us in going back to mental representations!

In a new preprint, we use a combination of 2AFC and discrimination tasks to quantify sensory, decisional, and metacognitive noise in units of the physical stimulus. We find that, across two experiments, sensory and decisional noise are comparable, while meta noise is lower. osf.io/preprints/ps...

new preprint! 🐍 In a dynamic Snake game inspired task, we show participants flexibly replan their behaviors after distraction, but this ability is constrained by memory load and distraction strength. EEG results coming soon👀 osf.io/preprints/ps...

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

Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience — a Perspective by Stephan Pohl, Edgar Y. Walker, David L. Barack, Jennifer Lee, Rachel N. Denison, Ned Block, Florent Meyniel & Wei Ji Ma www.nature.com/articles/s41...

happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉 building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax

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.

Very happy to share our review on Reinforcement Learning vs Statistical Learning, with @ambrafer.bsky.social and @predictivebrain.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A nice summary: www.sainsburywellcome.org/blog/two-eng...

Whether the hippocampus is involved in unrewarded learning has been a controversial question. A new preprint finds that it may be critical for passively learning information. By @natmesanash.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/memory/hippo...

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one? In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking: Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods? (alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

it's out! @hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place. philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

I'll be giving a talk in the #CNS2026 Rising Star session on Saturday. Come say hi if you're around!

it's endearing when your friend makes an emoji out of your face & it's used it in the department slack... right😅?

How hierarchical structures affect the when (what, where) of event memory? Hint: temporal compression 👇 A first virtual reality study by @matthewrlogie.bsky.social as part of experience-project.eu

Excited to share our new paper in @pnas.org with @bnmorillon.bsky.social & @valentinwyart.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We study three core inference systems, and how their interaction shapes human learning and decision-making.

New preprint! We mapped out how ‘diffuse’ predictions affect neural representations. We show predictions reshape the geometric layout of the neural representations by compressing the representational spread and stabilize the neural code by reducing the neural variance during memory encoding.

It's here and it has drag and drop. 💖

Which "statistic" governs statistical learning? Find out in this new article of our lab: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

New preprint 🚨 Across multiple tasks, we show that higher-level info is more readily accessible in WM before evidence accumulation begins. Attention then boosts perceptual detail. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A lot of fun with my colleagues @ckerren.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

An Efficient Computing Theory of Prefrontal Structured Working Memory Representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.16.706126v1

Our paper is now out at JNeuro! www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... How do we avoid attentional capture by salient stimuli? We found that inversions of singleton distractor representations support attentional suppression of salient items.

Applications are officially OPEN! Become a student or a Teaching Assistant in #NeuromatchAcademy or #ClimatematchAcademy ➡️ Apply now: portal.neuromatchacademy.org/sign-in Applications close 15 March. 🤓 Learn more: neuromatch.io/courses/ #ComputationalScience #OnlineLearning #GlobalLearning

My course notes have been updated to discuss how different models can be reframed in terms of a learning update rule (fusaroli.github.io/AdvancedCogn...) feedback is very welcome, as I was making it up as I was teaching the other day :-)

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 with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

New paper just published in Cerebral Cortex 🧠 Frontal midline theta synchronization causally supports updating statistical regularities, improving adaptive prediction without boosting simple performance. doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaf346 @orspesthy.bsky.social #neuroskyence

📜 Very happy to see our article on domain-general metacognition now published in Psychological Sciences ! Congrats to my co-authors @khat.bsky.social, Renate Rutiku, Michał Wierzchoń, and @krsandberg.bsky.social #skudnet journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... Quick thread:

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.