Deng Pan

Oops, wrong time in the original post! It will be 15:30 CET 😉

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...

Ultrasound system for precise neuromodulation of human deep brain circuits - Nature Communications Modulating deep brain structure can lead to therapies for neurological conditions. Here, the authors show a transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) system featuring a 256-element helmet-shaped trans...

Might focused ultrasound one day replace DBS?

UK Scientists built a 256-panel focused ultrasound helmet that can precisely target deep brain regions. Using theta-burst TUS, they stimulated the LGN and found visual cortex activity with effects lasting up to 40 minutes.

#neuroskyence #ultrasound

a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application ALT: a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application

📢 We are hiring! 📢
For our @wellcometrust.bsky.social grant on information gathering biases in #OCD and #Schizophrenia, we are looking for a Postdoc in Computational Modelling, supervised by Peter Dayan and myself.
Interested? See all the details in the job advert here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

📢 We're hiring a Research Assistant in cognitive neuroscience & computational psychiatry! 📢

Join us at UCL to conduct an MEG study of reward & memory, exploring how brain signals link to variability in apathy and anhedonia.

🔗 apply from next week: lmdlab.github.io

🚨closes September 12th!

The unexpected value of communicating science to the public Nature Reviews Neuroscience - As a group, our scientific community has a responsibility to unpack the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind our work for the public, not least because much...

Some scientists haven't yet internalized the "why" behind science writing for the public - not just as a service, but for themselves. (I didn't always get it). In this piece for @natrevneuro.nature.com, I draw on the neuroscience of curiosity & decision making to unpack its value.

rdcu.be/eCGr7

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Also check out the TUS study from @mkflugge.bsky.social lab! Hope TUS opens up a new avenue for exploring deep brain functions in healthy humans!

Deng Pan 潘登 on X: "🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning. https://t.co/2x3Efdrr57" / X 🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning. https://t.co/2x3Efdrr57

See also our thread on X (formerly Twitter): x.com/DengPan18/st...

Causal necessity of human hippocampus for structure-based inference in learning When meeting new individuals or encountering known individuals in new circumstances, we intuitively map out their relationships – not merely by direct experience, but by quickly inferring new connecti...

Full preprint:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We also thank @mkwittmann.bsky.social, @marcelomattar.bsky.social, and people from Behrens Lab
@behrenstimb.bsky.social, for their helpful comments on this work!

Also had a lot of fun presenting this at #RLDM2025 and #CCN2025. We really appreciate all the generous feedback.

Huge thanks to people in the Rushworth Lab and collaborators @oxexppsy.bsky.social who made this work possible:
@alimahmoodi.bsky.social @mkflugge.bsky.social @simonedambrogio.bsky.social @mirunarascu.bsky.social, Naomi Kingston, Pranav Sankhe, Shuyi Luo, and my incredible mentor Matthew Rushworth.

6. 🚀 This is enabled by transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS)—a safe, reversible, precise method to non-invasively probe deep brain function, which finally makes the hippocampus accessible in healthy humans.

Here is me being stimulated to test the TUS effect myself.

5. 🌟Empirical evidence: Using TUS to temporarily modulate hippocampal activity in healthy humans, we primarily disrupted their ability to use relational knowledge for inference, confirming its causal necessity for relational structure learning.

4. ⏩Computational predictions: An RNN trained on our task developed hippocampus-like units encoding relational structure. Lesioning these units selectively disrupted inference — predicting the hippocampus’s causal role.

3. 🧠 Neural basis: using fMRI, we show that such relational knowledge is consistently represented in the hippocampus across diverse contexts, in a manner distinct from other brain regions.

Next, we asked: Is this representation causally necessary for structure-based inference?

2. 🤖 Our RL models show that only models with relational knowledge capture human behaviour, outperforming experience-only models.

1. 👥 When meeting new people, we don’t learn about them from scratch — in our “Goalkeeper Game”, participants showed structure-based inference by leveraging relational knowledge to rapidly learn new relationships in changing environments.

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Causal necessity of human hippocampus for structure-based inference in learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.19.664920v1

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).

📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢

🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method.

Please RT

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

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...

🚨 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

We're excited to announce that WIN is now the Oxford University Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging: OxCIN! Our mission: developing and deploying neuroimaging and related technology to solve big challenges in basic neuroscience and brain health. oxcin.ox.ac.uk/about/vision

Communication of perceptual predictions from the hippocampus to the deep layers of the parahippocampal cortex High-resolution neuroimaging reveals stimulus-specific predictions sent from hippocampus to the neocortex during perception.

Our study using layer fMRI to study the direction of communication between the hippocampus and cortex during perceptual predictions is finally out in Science Advances! Predicted-but-omitted shapes are represented in CA2/3 and correlate specifically with deep layers of PHC, suggesting feedback. 🧠🟦

Neuroeconomics Summer School

announcing this year's neuroeconomics summer school, this time outside paris. too many great lecturers to list, even too many great organizers (plassmann,glimcher,tymula,kable,me). & you wouldnt believe all the past students and where they are now. sign up: www.insead.edu/events/neuro...

🚨 SUMMER SCHOOL!

Announcing the 2nd Birmingham-Leiden Summer School in Computational Social Cognition, Sep 2-5, 2025.

Fantastic line-up of keynote: Matthew Rushworth, Diana Tamir @dianatamir.bsky.social, and David Amodio @davidamodio.bsky.social .

👇
Apply by 18 April (compsoccog.com) and RT!

The conceptual structure of human relationships across modern and historical cultures - Nature Human Behaviour Cheng et al. explore the universality and cultural variability in how people understand human relationships, revealing a five-dimensional framework for relationship concepts across both modern and anc...

Our human relationship project has been published in Nature Human Behavior nature.com/articles/s41.... Freely download rdcu.be/edpa2. We also wrote a behind-the-paper blog communities.springernature.com/posts/mappin.... Thanks to all co-authors & helpful editorial team @naturehumbehav.bsky.social

Constructing future behavior in the hippocampal formation through composition and replay - Nature Neuroscience A model of compositional state spaces in the hippocampus shows latent learning and rapid generalization. Bakermans et al. show that this model predicts the emergence of place responses in replay.

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...

Study-phase reinstatement predicts subsequent recall - Nature Neuroscience How can the brain improve memory for an experience after it has occurred? Halpern et al. use intracranial EEG to show that, even while processing current experiences, people reactivate old ones and re...

Even while processing current experiences, people reactivate old ones and re-encode them (shown using intracranial EEG), turning thoughts into memories.

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