Apoorva Bhandari

🚨 We’re hiring! The Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Virginia Tech is looking for a postdoc to join our team studying the neural + computational mechanisms of structure learning and flexible cognition: ccnvt.github.io#positions

New Paper: Continuous Thought Machines

pub.sakana.ai/ctm/

Neurons in brains use timing and synchronization in the way that they compute, but this is largely ignored in modern neural nets. We believe neural timing is key for the flexibility and adaptability of biological intelligence.

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Check out our new special issue on cognitive flexibility @coolscontrol.bsky.social: authors.elsevier.com/a/1l4vl8MqMi...

A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain Although topographical maps organize many peripheral sensory systems, it remains unclear whether olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) choose which of the ~1100 odor receptors (ORs) to express based upon t...

Maps are everywhere in the brain...and finally we've discovered one in the nose! Led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social, we uncovered the logic that specifies the positions of each of the 1,000 sensory neuron subtypes in the nose and aligns their projections to the brain.👇👃see more details below👃👇

What a terrific idea.

ARIA Opportunity Space: Scalable Neural Interfaces

Looking for an exciting fellowship in AI & Neuro, with competitive salary (~£100k)? We got a new position in the lab at Oxford, working with @somnirons.bsky.social and me! 🧪

Our project: encode.pillar.vc/projects/beh...

General info: encode.pillar.vc

#compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience #sciencejobs

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share our latest story! We found disentangled memory representations in the hippocampus that generalized across time and environments, despite the seemingly random drift and remapping of single cells. This code enabled the transfer of prior knowledge to solve new tasks

If you are curious about the brain🧠 on causal inference, insight💡, memory retrieval, and narrative comprehension🎬, this will be the one.

work by dream team @jinke.bsky.social Rhea Madhogarhia @ycleong.bsky.social @monicarosenb.bsky.social ⭐

Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex - Nature A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to represent patterns of social interaction.

Nature research paper: Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex

https://go.nature.com/3FsvUTi

How did early human symbolic behavior evolve? osf.io/preprints/ps... Can we use cultural transmission chains to explore how humans were using and producing the 40k-year of engravings from Blombos & Diepkloof? W Pagnotta Tylén @felixthehauskat.bsky.social & others. A thread:

Our paper in Nature (@mkwittmann.bsky.social et al.): the brain does not only process the *identity* of a person but primarily our *relationship* to them. Even on a neural level, who someone is *in relation to others* is key. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #neuroskyence

New from the lab!! 👉🏼 authors.elsevier.com/a/1kgT43BtfH... 📝 @cellpress.bsky.social We discovered that genetically-defined neuron types in the hippocampus form unique manifolds! Dual color imaging, chemogenetics and topological analysis all at once! With Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social

Averaging brain responses is not a great idea...
#neuroscience #neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Computation-through-Dynamics Benchmark: Simulated datasets and quality metrics for dynamical models of neural activity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.07.637062v1

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

Cool new work from my labmate Alice!

New paper with Alice Xia, Yang Teoh and Oriel FeldmanHall.

Please do share your feedback and thoughts, and repost!

This is the hardest project I've worked on: extensive methods development, painstaking piloting, writing two grants, intensive data collection, and a LOT of thinking. It needed a huge dose of patience as we carried its burden over many years. A bit like Frodo carrying the ring.

Collectively, studying representations of two different task structures in the same subjects revealed generalizable principles by which lPFC tailors representations to different tasks.

Learning shapes neural geometry in the prefrontal cortex bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

The flat task showed local high-dim structure and orthogonality across clusters that were unrelated to the structure of the task. These may have been vestiges of an expressive, task-agnostic representation. Such a process has been observed in monkey lPFC www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

However, there were clues in the data suggesting lPFC may have started with a task-agnostic, high-dim representation with learning-driven dimensionality reduction helping reshape it to fit the task structure.

Therefore, at least in highly trained subjects, lPFC learned task-tailored representations that recapitulated the structure of the task, showing that lPFC representations are shaped by representation learning.

On the other hand, in the flat task, a global axis encoded the response-relevant, XOR categories abstractly. Category-specific local geometries were high-dimensional, retaining stimulus information that was not strictly required for readout.

In the hierarchy task, the global axis abstractly encoded higher-level context, while low-dimensional, context-specific local geometries compressed context-irrelevant information & abstractly encoded context-relevant response-relevant category.

Using a series of decoding analyses, we comprehensively worked out the detailed local structure within each cluster in both tasks.

Nevertheless, lPFC representational geometry for each task was highly tailored to its structure. In each task, clustering created subspaces along a global axis - context subspaces in the hierarchy task, and response category subspaces in the flat task.

Across both tasks, inputs were encoded on manifolds of intermediate dimensionality, with at least some non-linear mixing of inputs. These representations did not differ in their overall separability, or degree of non-linear mixing.

With decoding analyses, across both task structures, we found lPFC coding diverse task-relevant information. On the other hand, primary auditory cortex showed obligatory coding of only auditory information, whether or not it was task-relevant.