The First 1,000 Days (1kD) Project - Collecting and Analyzing an Ultra-Dense Naturalistic Dataset of Human Baby Development https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.19.712982v1

Looking for alternatives to quadratic functions for closed-form analysis in optimization? This post explores matrix Riccati dynamics and their applications to neural networks. francisbach.com/closed-form-...

Here's a lovely #blueprint on a new study from our lab led by @royeyono.bsky.social. tl;dr: it implies that there may be interneurons whose role is to normalize credit assignment signals during learning. #neuroscience 🧪

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

Poster tonight at #cosyne26 (1-079)! @wanqingjiang.bsky.social & @noehamou.bsky.social show that mice learn hidden community structure in a 15-odour graph even when transition statistics are flat. Fun collaboration with @saxelab.bsky.social that started with East London coffees ☕!

Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL: arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688 They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.

Thanks @natmesanash.bsky.social for covering our new work, in @thetransmitter.bsky.social!

📢📢 Announcing this year's conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience & AI (Rome, 9-12th June). We’ve got a stellar line-up and venue, and invite everyone to join: www.neuromonster.org

📢 Job alert - Deep Learning Theory & AI Safety Applications open for a postdoc fellow (@saxelab.bsky.social lab) to study artificial deep networks using techniques from applied maths & stat physics. ⏰ Deadline: 26 Mar 2026 🤝 In collaboration with @stefsm.bsky.social ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

Excited to be co-organising a #cosyne2026 workshop with Alison Comrie on 'algorithms for learning from scratch'! With a great line-up of speakers, we'll be tackling the question of what processes enable naive biological & artificial agents to adapt to new situations. Info here: tinyurl.com/4u8enf7k

📢 We’re now accepting applications for the 2026 School on Analytical Connectionism dedicated this year to Language Acquisition. 📍 Gothenburg, Sweden 🗓️ August 17–28, 2026 ☠️ Apply by April 17! 🔗 analytical-connectionism.net/school/2026/ 👇 Meet the experts joining us this summer!

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...

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety. Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment. 1

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

Why don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures? Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607

📢 Applications open on 19 Jan for the 7-week #Mathematics #SummerSchool in London. You will develop the maths skills and intuition necessary to enter the #TheoreticalNeuroscience / #MachineLearning field. Find out more & register for the information webinar 👉 www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931

Our paper on the "Oneirogen hypothesis" is now up in its revised form on eLife! This is the hypothesis that psychedelics induce a dream-like state, which we show via modelling could explain a variety of perceptual and learning effects from such drugs. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 🧠📈 🧪

By the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)

New preprint. We show that in addition to reward prediction errors (RPEs), dorsal striatal dopamine signals encode sensory prediction errors (SPEs), the difference between sensory prior & observed stimulus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Sleep dependent consolidation and replay that doesn’t require the hippocampus? Very beautiful work by Marcus Stephenson-Jones’ lab on sleep driven sequential skill consolidation in the striatum. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thrilled to start 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS @ualberta.bsky.social + Amii.ca Fellow! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural & artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (speaking coginterp.github.io/neurips2025 & organising @dataonbrainmind.bsky.social)

Find us at NeurIPS, Thur 4:30 pm #2115! We know networks have to be both plastic and stable but we're used to thinking about computations, such as memory, as additional requirements. Instead, we find that almost all stable & plastic networks display simple memory abilities.

1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs. 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025... Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social

When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com Work with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @tsonj.bsky.social, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Could SWC be the place where you launch your career in #neuroscience? 🧠 Don’t miss your chance! Apply to our PhD Programme before 3 Nov: www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/content/... #Career #PhD #London

Want the freedom of a fancy fellowship, but not the year-long wait or arduous application? Come join my lab! Work on neuroscience and AI, explore your creativity, be independent or work closely with me, collaborate widely, and have a lot of fun! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

How does our brain excel at complex object recognition, yet get fooled by simple illusory contours? What unifying principle governs all Gestalt laws of perceptual organization? We may have an answer: integration of learned priors through feedback. New paper with @kenmiller.bsky.social! 🧵

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce… 🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉 The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

🚨 New preprint alert! 🧠🤖 We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up. 🧠📈 A 🧵: tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3

🙋Are you interested in bridging theory & experiments? Applications are now open for 2026 entry to the Gatsby Unit & SWC joint PhD programme. Join us and be part of a vibrant research community! 💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science... @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social

Interested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz: 1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro... 2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri... You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interested in a #PhD in machine learning & theoretical neuroscience? Applications for 2026 entry to the Gatsby Unit PhD programme are open! 💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme 🤝 Close links to @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/life-sciences/gatsby/study-and-work/gatsby-unit-phd-programme

Structure transfer and consolidation in visual implicit learning 🧠🟦 🧠🤖 elifesciences.org/articles/100...

1/ 🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩 #neuroskyence

What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !

Here is our best thinking about how to make world models. I would apologize for it being a massive 40-page behemoth, but it's worth reading. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737

Just spent two wonderful weeks in London for the Analytical Connectionism Summer School (hosted at Gatsby/UCL this year). Met lots of wonderful scientists at the intersection of cog neuro and machine learning. Learned a lot and can’t recommend more highly! Small meetings rule

I recently learned: w/ lesioned 8A, you can do many WM tasks but not one👇 Guess what happens when you decoding from 8A during each of these tasks? They are all the same. Decoding is like a quality check, it provides almost no info about function scholar.google.com/citations?vi...

We all know that correlation doesn't imply causation. So we took some correlations and tested if they were causal. Here's what happened: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Our #CCN2025 GAC debate w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, Gemma Roig (www.cvai.cs.uni-frankfurt.de), Jacqueline Gottlieb (gottlieblab.com), Klaus Oberauer, @mschrimpf.bsky.social &‬ @brittawestner.bsky.social asks: 📊 What benchmarks are useful for cognitive science? 💭 2025.ccneuro.org/gac

Are similar representations in neural nets evidence of shared computation? In new theory work w/ Lukas Braun (lukasbraun.com) & @saxelab.bsky.social, we prove that representational comparisons are ill-posed in general, unless networks are efficient. @icmlconf.bsky.social @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

My first PhD paper - with @lhuntneuro.bsky.social and @summerfieldlab.bsky.social - is now out in @plosbiology.org! We ask: how do humans (and deep neural networks) navigate flexibly even in unfamiliar environments, such as a new city? Link: plos.io/45uSwNm 🧵 (1/6)

🚨Pre-print alert🚨 We stimulated serotonin with optogenetics while doing large-scale Neuropixel recordings across the mouse brain. We found strong widespread modulation of neural activity, but no effect on the choices of the mouse 🐭 How is this possible? Strap in! (1/9) 👇🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...

12 leading neuroscientists tackle a big question: Will we ever understand the brain? Their reflections span philosophy, complexity, and the limits of scientific explanation. www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog/wil... Illustration by @gilcosta.bsky.social & @joanagcc.bsky.social

Coming March 17, 2026! Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.