Andrej Bicanski

Great to have @lukaskunz.bsky.social with next week! Looking forward to this.

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

Probabilistic Foundations of Fuzzy Simplicial Sets for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction Fuzzy simplicial sets have become an object of interest in dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, most prominently through their role in UMAP. However, their definition through tools from alg...

New preprint! Have you ever wondered, what are these fuzzy simplicial sets, the theoretical framework behind e.g. UMAP? Here we show that you may simply see them as marginal distributions over simplicial sets. This provides a generative model for UMAP. (1/2)

arxiv.org/abs/2512.03899

The effects of task similarity during representation learning in brains and neural networks Nature Communications - Here, the authors show learning tasks with similar structures can initially cause interference and slow down learning, but both the brain and artificial networks gradually...

Our new paper, now published in @natcomms.nature.com , asks a simple question: when two tasks share a common structure, does the brain learn them more efficiently? Surprisingly, this was not the case. Thread below (1/7)
rdcu.be/eSwvU

Dear colleagues, please check out this paper on aging and the HD system + gracefully degrading, biologically plausible HD attractor networks. Well done Matthieu!

A neural state space for episodic memories Episodic memories are highly dynamic and change in nonlinear ways over time. This dynamism is not captured by existing systems consolidation theories …

I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting.

A neural state space for episodic memories

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory How does the brain access stored knowledge? It has been proposed that conceptual search engages neurocognitive processes similar to foraging in physical space. We tested this idea using intracranial E...

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The dependence of children’s generalization on episodic memory varies with age and level of abstraction - Nature Communications Children’s ability to generalize from episodic memories varies by both age and the level of abstraction. Here, the authors show that lower level generalization increasingly depends on episodic memory with age, whereas higher level generalization shows no such relationship.

Thrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

⏳ Deadline approaching! Apply by 13 Oct for the Postdoc in Cognitive Neuroscience at MPI Leipzig.

If you're interested in the cognitive neuroscience of memory feel free to email me!

I do experimental psychology, brain imaging (fMRI and MEG) and a bit of modelling. Lab is doing stuff on forgetting, aging, schemas, and event boundaries, but we're not limited to that.

#psychscisky #neuroskyence

🔎Wir suchen zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt eine engagierte und kompetente Persönlichkeit für die

Verwaltungsleitung (m/w/d)
in Vollzeit | unbefristet | #Leipzig
Bitte hier bewerben: recruitingapp-5218.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/43...?

#wissenschaft #administration #career #maxplanck

** We have up to TWO funded PhD positions available in our lab!! Apply below to find new ways to enhance memory👇 Pls retweet **

Deadline: 2nd December

1. Cross-species closed-loopTMR: tinyurl.com/bddu4tp6

2. TUS and TMR in humans:
tinyurl.com/jjws5ctj

Happy to chat to interested applicants.

With many thanks to @colinlever.bsky.social for stimulating discussions.

Dynamic updating of cognitive maps via traces of experience in the subiculum In the classical view of hippocampal function, the subiculum is assigned the role as the output layer. In spatial paradigms, some subiculum neurons manifest as so-called boundary vector cells (BVCs), ...

New preprint from the lab and great work by Fei Wang. We show how subiculum trace vector cells can be modeled consistent with known effects in CA1. Traces are driven by a mismatch learning rule to keep associative memories in line with experience.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appea...

Surprise, surprise!

hbr.org/2025/09/ai-g...

A while in the making, here's a short paper on how one might get from spatial to episodic memory with temporal indexing, sequence generation via grid cell analogs, + a bit of perspective/review on time, wider HPC function ...

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Open positions Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Science, Vacancies, Open positions

... and a direct link to the application portal:
www.cbs.mpg.de/vacancies/op...

Neural Computation

Join us as part of the Neural Computation Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig:
www.cbs.mpg.de/psychology/n...

Dear colleagues, we have an open PhD position in computational neuroscience - spatial memory models and intracranial recordings - fully funded. Re-advertised, candidates are ideally available in the near future. A collab. with 4 labs. Apply here: tinyurl.com/yc84ctap

We did it! 🏆 We won Phase 1 and placed 2nd overall in the Algonauts 2025 Challenge. So proud of the crew
@keckjanis.bsky.social,Viktor Studenyak,Daniel Schad,Aleksandr Shpilevoi. Huge thanks to @andrejbicanski.bsky.social and @doellerlab.bsky.social for support. Report: arxiv.org/abs/2507.17958

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...

I am not an expert on EEG or CLT, but this seems to be the most expected result ever, and yet very important to show.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

preprint alert 🚨
1/ Can we accurately detect sequential replay in humans using Temporally Delayed Linear Modelling (#TDLM)? In our recent study, we could not find any replay and decided to dig deeper by running a hybrid simulation with surprising results. Link to preprint & details below 👇

Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science.

From today, every paper submitted to Nature -if published - will be accompanied by peer reviewers comments & authors rebuttal.

We started the trial in 2020; we now want to open up the review process & showcase its role in shaping & improving papers
🧪 #AcademicSky

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Congrats Volker (‪@reisnerv.bsky.social‬). Collab with Doellerlab, modeling by Viktor Studenyak via the Neural Computation Group

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

My colleague Dan Bush (not on BSky) at UCL is looking for a post-doc. Focus on intracranial EEG and single cell recordings from epilepsy patients + MEG recordings from healthy volunteers during spatial and episodic memory tasks. Apply here
tinyurl.com/n6nkty8e

Re-posting is appreciated: We have a fully funded PhD position in CMC lab @cmc-lab.bsky.social (at @tudresden_de). You can use forms.gle/qiAv5NZ871kv... to send your application and find more information. Deadline is April 30. Find more about CMC lab: cmclab.org and email me if you have questions.

Balancing central control and sensory feedback produces adaptable and robust locomotor patterns in a spiking, neuromechanical model of the salamander spinal cord Author summary In this paper, we developed a computational model to investigate how salamanders move, both while swimming and walking. Unlike previous studies that often oversimplified the dynamics of...

Out in PLOSCompBio: Spiking, neuro-mechanical CPG model ...
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

No hippocampus here :-), but CPG people will hopefully enjoy this.

Also, great to work with Biorob at EPFL again, and congrats to Alessandro.

Our group after a week long Strüngmann Forum in Frankfurt! Group 1 rocks!! @russellepstein.bsky.social @andrejbicanski.bsky.social @lukaskunz.bsky.social @flaviodonato82.bsky.social @ekfarran.bsky.social and others I can’t find yet on Bluesky

looks very interesting!

Postdoc alert! Come work with me on an ESRC project on the role of narratives in the learning and retention of educational material.

2 year position, start date flexible but no later than 1st September.

Application deadline 1st March.

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition