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...

I'm recruiting PhD students for my lab at Northwestern! I'm reviewing applications for the Department of Psychology for the Cognitive Affective Neuroscience and Clinical areas, due 12/1. 🧠 Come join the CATS Lab: nucatslab.com Learn about our latest research: iamh.northwestern.edu/research/res...

I’m excited to share my recent preprint on a neural network model of free recall that learns multiple memory strategies including the memory palace! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper out in cognition with @arikahn.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, Cate Hartley, and @katenuss.bsky.social !! We show that children 👶 use predictive representations (e.g. SR) to guide their choices, providing an account of how they can make flexible choices in a changing world

Why does AI sometimes fail to generalize, and what might help? In a new paper (arxiv.org/abs/2509.16189), we highlight the latent learning gap — which unifies findings from language modeling to agent navigation — and suggest that episodic memory complements parametric learning to bridge it. Thread:

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...

New preprint from the lab! 🧠 Led by Juliana Trach, w/ Sophia Ou Using fMRI, we discovered evidence for time-sensitive reward prediction errors (RPEs) in the human cerebellum. Builds on, and extends, recent work in both rodents and NHPs

I'm excited to share that my new postdoctoral position is going so well that I submitted a new paper at the end of my first week! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A thread below

Successful prediction of the future enhances encoding of the present. I am so delighted that this work found a wonderful home at Open Mind. The peer review journey was a rollercoaster but it *greatly* improved the paper. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Thrilled to announce that I'll be starting in January 2026 as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York. The lab will study the thought processes that underlie our decision-making.

Very happy to see this work with Euan Prentis posted! If you’re going to CCN next week, go check out Euan’s poster on this work!

My first, first author paper, comparing the properties of memory-augmented large language models and human episodic memory, out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! authors.elsevier.com/a/1lV174sIRv... Here’s a quick 🧵(1/n)

Super excited to share this one!! Meta-learning sparsity and learning rate gives rise to brain-like gradients of complementary learning systems. So complementary learning systems emerge organically through behavior optimization, and it's not just two of them!!

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

One way to tackle a new task is to reuse solutions from the past. Check out Sam Hall-McMaster's latest finding that strategy reuse is accompanied by neural reactivation of prior solutions @plosbiology.org Collab w/ M Tomov & @gershbrain.bsky.social #neuroskyence journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

📢 now out @natrevpsychol.nature.com In a new perspective w/ @davidnagy.bsky.social & @gergoorban.bsky.social, we reconcile a glaring problem in applying rate-distortion theory as a framework for human memory, integrating empirical findings across a host of human memory research 🧵👇

I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026! I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory! RT appreciated! (1/5)

work with fred! can’t recommend more highly

🚨Today's Computational Psychiatry seminar at the MPC is given by Dr. Jonathan Nicholas @jonathannicholas.bsky.social Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision making via access to individual events and their details. 2pm London UK time. DM @yanivabir.bsky.social to join.

Come see our lab's first poster at #SANS2025!! Megan Spurney will present exciting new results revealing that rewards boost working memory accuracy for kids and teens, but less so for adults. Friday 4/25 @ 4:15 Poster P2-A-13 Investigating Age-Related Flexibility in Cognitive Effort Allocation

The precision of hippocampal representations predicts incremental value-learning across the adult lifespan https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.08.647815v1

See me at #COSYNE2025 poster session 2 if you want to learn more about this emerging work!

Why do we remember so many details of our experiences even when it is unclear if we will actually ever need them? In a new preprint, @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I asked whether this property is adaptive, because what will be relevant in the future often (usually?!) isn’t apparent.

Thank you to Ingrid Wickelgren and the team at Quanta for putting together this great piece, describing work by my lab and others on the neural representations of events

Excited to share a new paper with Daphna Shohamy & @nathanieldaw.bsky.social! Using fmri reactivation, we measured *when* people build preferences from memory. We found that people tend to do so before a choice, but that they also wait until choice time when options are linked to multiple memories

excited to (finally!) share :) www.jneurosci.org/content/45/6...

hello world. we have an opening for a strong theory postdoc to work in my lab on a exciting collaboration with Josh Berke and Loren Frank labs modeling and analyzing data on rat hipp-pfc-bg-da involvement in spatial maze foraging, replay, value etc. apply here: www.princeton.edu/acad-positio...

Amazing collective problem solving in ants:

I feel super lucky to have been part of this project showing how people selectively simulate actions whose value is more uncertain. To highlight one result, Haoxue shows that people preferentially simulate actions that lead to a greater number of possible future states.

If you haven’t read this yet, drop everything and do it. Thought provoking, based on fantastic & insightful examples (how much info do you need to solve Rubik’s cube?) In PhD, while training rats on a Y-maze, I could not help thinking that the outcome was just 1 bit (left/right). I now have answers

This paper is magical.

🔔𝐍𝐄𝐖 𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐓🔔 Beyond excited to present our new work showcasing 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐝! Wait what? Exciting collab w/ @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/11)

Check out our latest, led by @marlietandoc.bsky.social!! We find that memory for individual features of objects is rapidly distorted by the objects' category structure. Plus simulations that provide an account of how the hippocampus may contribute to this effect.

Very nice example of how useful comparison (or trend calculation) usually needs something more than coefficients. They have a nice page on the general idea that is hidden down in the thread: ourworldindata.org/age-standard...

New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Mary Heilmann, Tehachapi II, 1979 https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1137663

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉 tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...

“We found that participants with lesions to the vmPFC waited less overall, while participants with lesions to the dmPFC and anterior insula were specifically impaired at calibrating their level of persistence to the environment.” www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

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)

Man with a Beer Jug, by Frans Hals, 1630, 📸 by @zachosterman.bsky.social

Henry Wallis, Study for ‘Chatterton’, 1856 https://botfrens.com/collections/14375/contents/1124474

Amazons workers across 20 countries, including the United States, are striking against what the organizing labor union calls anti-worker and anti-democratic practices.

"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8

A student asked me the other day whether I had major career ambitions like winning a big award. I told him that my goal was to do interesting things and have fun. I worry that young scientists don't see their jobs as fun... too much pressure. But then what's the point, really?

Very excited that this paper led by @cybellesmith.bsky.social is now out in JoCN!! We show how humans and recurrent neural nets can learn statistics unfolding at multiple timescales rapidly and concurrently. direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

365 Santa Claus

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

Nature Neuroscience A retinotopic code structures the interaction between perception and memory systems www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🌟 Cai Lab Nature (@natureportfolio.bsky.social) paper alert! In work led by Joe Zaki, we find that rest periods after learning not only stabilize new memories BUT ALSO integrate new memories with older ones from days past! (1/10) Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...