I'm excited to share that our paper "Default Feature Representations of the Cognitive Map" has been accepted to #NeurIPS2026! 🧵

New lab preprint! @khoudary.bsky.social presents a tour-de-force: a new model of how uncertain expectations should help resolve uncertain sensations, supported by re-analysis of four experiments in monkeys (behavior, ephys) and humans (behavior, fMRI, EEG, intracranial)

@meganakpeters.bsky.social

The lab had 4 out of 4 papers accepted at NeurIPS. More on each one soon.

We also have postdoc openings funded by our new grants, so email me if you're interested in our research.
usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

I am happy to share some good news: my lab has received an NSF CAREER award and an NIH R01 this summer, supporting our work on how the brain handles uncertainty during learning. We will be hiring postdocs and PhD students in the coming year, so please get by email in touch if you are interested.

🗣️excited to be giving a TALK TMRW at #VSS2026 🏖️

if you're interested in anything predictive learning, metacognition, successor representations & more, check it out!☀️

🕚 tues may 19 @ 12 pm
📍talk rm 2: decision-making

w/ @meganakpeters.bsky.social ✨

Universal Geometry of Compositional Construction in Prefrontal Cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.23.720375v1

News! I've joined the Astera Institute to lead its neuroscience based AGI research. Backed by $1B+ commitment over the coming decade, my team will explore novel, brain-inspired architectures and algos toward safe, efficient human-like AGI, working alongside Doris Tsao. 1/

astera.org/dileep-georg...

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions

rdcu.be/eRVUk

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex.
rdcu.be/eAofi

RFK Jr. just fired thousands of federal workers at crucial health agencies, including the FDA, CDC, and NIH.

These are the people who inspect our food, track infectious diseases, and research life-saving treatments and cures.

How is this "Making America Healthy Again"?

1/ Thrilled to start on Bluesky with our latest publication in Nature Neuroscience (@natneuro.nature.com) – and huge congratulations to RoryBufacchi who led this work (first at @ucl.ac.uk and then @iitalk.bsky.social) with extraordinary insight and fastidiousness.

Free full text: rdcu.be/eo3G3

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

new paper from a collaborative endeavor! (@co0p3r.bsky.social) we find & replicate food-reward biases in a reinforcement learning task (where food stim are incidental)

people with eating disorder symptoms show a low-calorie food bias while those without show a high-calorie food bias... (1/3)

A model of compositional state spaces in the #hippocampus shows latent learning and rapid generalisation, and predicts the emergence of place responses in replay – which is discovered empirically in an existing dataset 🧪🧠

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new paper explores how to align LLMs with System 1 (intuitive) and System 2 (analytical) thinking styles. This work challenges the idea that step-by-step reasoning (CoT) is always best and highlights the need for adapting reasoning strategies based on the task
arxiv.org/abs/2502.12470

📣 Excited to announce our workshop "Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Complex Planning, Embodiment, and Beyond" at the upcoming @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #CoSyNe2025! 🧠🤖 🪱🪰🐟🐝🐭💪

Schedule: neuro-agent-models.github.io
🗓️ Join us in Mont-Tremblant, Canada, on March 31!

🖌️☺️🧪

“Some scientists, I think, are in this sense poets.” - Wendell Berry

Please share: I have a friend with access to food trucks in LA that is looking for locations to set them up this weekend that will be useful to the largest number of people and will allow a food truck to park there. Not looking for suggestions but actual contacts

Reposting this from X so my page isn't so barren...

Are you a fan of @payampiray.bsky.social's Linear RL model but not of MATLAB? I coded a barebones version of it in Python!