Mathias Sablé-Meyer

Thread of French and Dutch research institutes slowly unsubscribing from web of science (and thence impact factors).

Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for our ability to rapidly and flexibly adapt our behavior in new environments based on our previous experience. Despite its importance, the neural substrates a...

1/ Excited to share that our symposium review covering cognitive mapping in the PFC just came out in the Journal of Neuroscience: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

Will you be at #SfN25? Stop by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre’s posters and talks! @sfn.org

Also check out our review accompanying the symposium here: doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
With Sebastijan Veselic, Elena Gutierrez, @melgaby.bsky.social @sandra-neuro.bsky.social @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social

Come join us at #SfN25 for the minisymposium "Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex"!
Saturday, Nov 15, 2:00-4:30pm, Room SDCC 6CF
www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/21171...
We will explore how the PFC represents structured relationships across species and how this supports flexible behavior.

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...

The heartbreaking thing about this
is that there’s already a proven way
to invest lots of money in a knowledge machine
that produces unforeseeable results
that include fantastically profitable ideas
(and some life-saving ones)
and generally benefit society
and this machine is called
a university

Confidence in absence as confidence in counterfactual visibility: a CogSci proceedings paper with star MSc student Maya Schipper, is now out on PsyArXiv:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵👇

Anyone with a WSJ subscription & app can check whether that summary appears in anything actually written by WSJ? Somehow I would find it even more fitting/absurd if this was an AI-powered notification summary.
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat...

Open science initiatives have gained traction in recent years. However, open peer-review practices, i.e., reforms that (i) modify the identifiability of stakeholders and (ii) establish channels for the open communication of information between stakeholders, have seen very little adoption in economics. In this paper, we explore the feasibility and desirability of such reforms. We present insights derived from survey data documenting the attitudes of 802 experimental/behavioral economists, a conceptual framework, a literature review, and cross-disciplinary data on current journal practices. On (i), most respondents support preserving anonymity for referees, but views about anonymity for authors and associate editors are mixed. On (ii), most respondents are open to publishing anonymized referee reports, sharing reports between referees, and allowing authors to appeal editorial decisions. Active reviewers, editors, and respondents from the US/Canada are generally less open to transparency reforms.

New survey of 802 experimental/behavioral economists finds:

(a) most support preserving anonymity for referees

(b) most are open to publishing anonymized referee reports

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me...

By @danieljevans.bsky.social, @adam-gill.bsky.social, et al.

It was really great to meet and work with @maxencepajot.bsky.social as he was trailblazing this—congrats!! 👏

Takeaways: you can predict number frequencies in books by thinking of numbers as programs, testing mental representation ideas from doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

See Maxence's great thread below👇

Some numbers seem to show up everywhere. Think of 10, 12, 24, 36...
Others—like 26 or 34—don’t get the same attention.Why? In our new paper with @standehaene.bsky.social and @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social, we argue it's because of how the mind builds number concepts.
🧵
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Signez la pétition Sauvons le Palais de la découverte

Retour d'une vieille rengaine: étouffer le palais de la découverte pour justifier son unification avec la cité des sciences et de l'industrie. Curiosité scientifique ≠ fascination technologique; ces institutions ont des rôles très distincts!

Signalez votre soutien www.change.org/p/sauvons-le...

Second night of #pint25 was really fun 🧠🍻 @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social and @matanmazor.bsky.social gave spectacular talks and we couldn't stop the audience from asking questions—nor did we want to.
Can’t wait for tonight, grab your ticket and join us!

Pr. Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh explaining "How Can Large Language Models Become More Human?" to a captivated audience.
#pint25 has started; it's great fun to see it come together! Join our "Beautiful Mind" theme at The George IV in Chiswick, or any other fascinating topics featured in pintofscience.co.uk

Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry? Concepts of exact number are often thought to originate from counting and the successor function, or from a refinement of the approximate number system (ANS). We argue here for a third origin: a shared language-of-thought (LoT) for geometry and arithmetic that involves primitives of repetition, concatenation, and recursive embedding. Applied to sets, those primitives engender concepts of exact integers through recursive applications of additions and multiplications. Links between geometry and arithmetic also explain the emergence of higher-level notions (squares, primes, etc.). Under our hypothesis, understanding a number means having one or several mental expressions for it, and their minimal description length (MDL) determines how easily they can be mentally manipulated. Several historical, developmental, linguistic, and brain imaging phenomena provide preliminary support for our proposal.

Online Now: Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?

We're bringing together leading researchers from top institutions worldwide to Split, Croatia this summer. If you're passionate about brain-inspired AI, computational neuroscience, or fundamental mathematical principles driving intelligence, this conference is the place to be!

Large group of people of different ages, races, genders, sexualities and abilities. Text reads, 'Feminism is the radical notion women deserve equal rights'

It's #InternationalWomensDay and apparently feminist slogans from 50 years ago are relevant again.

The general trend is crazy. Here is Twitter vs Bluesky volumes for the last week. On some days they are equal in volume.

Really cool work showing non-trivial statistical learning in speech in <4 days old babies, check this out 👇

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS!!!
Harvard's graduate student organization, Women in Psychology, is super excited to host the 2025 Trends in Psychology Summit (TiPS) conference in May! Abstract submissions for poster presentations, blitz talks, and sketchpads closes Friday, February 14th at 12:00PM EST.

New paper from the lab!
Mathias Sablé-Meyer used behavior, fMRI and MEG to study the mental representation of geometric shapes (quadrilaterals ranging in regularity from squares and rectangles to random figures).
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Call for Projects : Postdoctoral Study grants Apply online until Monday, March 31, 2025. Opening on Monday, February 3 www.fondationfyssen.fr

Call for projects - Postdoctoral Study Grants 2025

Delighted to share that I’ll be joining
@oxexppsy.bsky.social
as a group leader/Faculty next spring. My group will investigate how our cells build models of the world and of our internal goals, and how this goes wrong in disorders like schizophrenia.

Having Fun with Stimuli, 2024

Also. Hello bsky. Sorry I'm late.