Sofiya Zbaranska 🇺🇦

Join us December 5th at University of Toronto (in-person and online) for a special seminar by Dr. Aran Nayebi on reverse-engineering the brain and building neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence.

#neuroAI #compneuro @anayebi.bsky.social @utoronto.ca @uoftcompsci.bsky.social

New paper from the lab 🚨
Led by Ali Golbabaei, this study explores the how the composition of prefrontal cortical engrams changes with memory age:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lzT-3BtfH...

Had a pleasure to give an invited talk at UCU on engrams and how they support various memory phenomena:

youtu.be/ETVgqyQwZVM?...

Imagine a brain decoding algorithm that could generalize across different subjects and tasks. Today, we’re one step closer to achieving that vision.

Introducing the flagship paper of our brain decoding program: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#neuroAI #compneuro @utoronto.ca @uhn.ca

Looking forward to giving a talk on the latest developments in engram research 🧠
The main lecture will be in English, with a part on my own research in Ukrainian.
Kindly hosted by Ukrainian Catholic University — everyone’s welcome! Register via the QR code 👇

“If everything is everywhere, why have distinct areas? Here we show that the function of a brain area is more related to how different types of information are combined (formatted) in neural representations than merely whether that information is present.”

Despite its efficiency, the brain is oddly inefficient: requires ~8 hours of sleep for every 16 hours of runtime. We spend a third of our lives recharging.

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience.

#neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

#IBB shared some highlights from their visit to @sjo09.bsky.social lab. It was rewarding to see how much interest was sparked by #engrams as well as #ML and #NeuroAI 🧠✨

Shoutout to @mhsarikahya.bsky.social & other JF lab members!

Thanks! 👾

Wrapped up 2 intense weeks at #NeuroAI by @neuromatch.bsky.social! 🚀
Our team explored how RNNs encode spatial memory — and found they implicitly learn a discrete spatial layout.

🔍 Check it out: github.com/neur1s/GridVaders

Thanks to my amazing teammates!

#AI #Neuroscience #RNN #GridWorld

(1/7) New preprint from Rajan lab! 🧠🤖
@ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social & Riley Simmons-Edler show–through cog sci, neuro & ethology–how an AI agent with fewer ‘neurons’ than an insect can forage, find safety & dodge predators in a virtual world. Here's what we built

Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06981

Of Mice and Machines: A Comparison of Learning Between Real World Mice and RL Agents Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex decision-making tasks. This progress raises a natural question: how do these artificial systems comp...

This is fun - to make RL models more like mice in the paths they select, you gotta give them the fear of death:

arxiv.org/abs/2505.12204

🧠📈 🧪

Event structure sculpts neural population dynamics in the lateral entorhinal cortex Our experience of the world is a continuous stream of events that must be segmented and organized at multiple timescales. The neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unknown. In this work, we...

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it.
In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2)

👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

☝️

Last Year's Move to Toronto And This Year's Politics (video and commentary)

It took me a while, but I can now see a purpose in speaking to the discussion of my departure from Yale for the University of Toronto. Here I address four public framings of last year’s move that arose in recent weeks, which tell us something of our present moment
snyder.substack.com/p/last-years...

My first time at #FIP and thrilled to have scored a poster prize 🥳

Making social memories at #CAN2025

Conferenciating at #CAN2025 today? Come see my poster on social memory!

Learn how the amygdala helps us tell apart friends vs. foes (as reenacted in the photo) and how this ability is shaped by oxytocin signaling and engrams :)

Thank you for organizing this amazing meeting! 🙌

The room of attendees at the 2025 CAN Neural Circuits and Behaviour Satellite Meeting.

fantastic day at the 2025 Neural Circuits and Behaviour Satellite meeting! great talks by trainees Xin Zhao, Govind Peringod, Luca Pancotti, and Peiying Wen, and congrats to Govind for his top trainee talk award! so cool to see all the great circuits and behaviour work across the country

A hypothalamic circuit underlying the dynamic control of social homeostasis - Nature New data on brain-wide circuits centred around two interconnected hypothalamic neuron populations provide significant mechanistic insights into the emergence of social need during social isolation and...

Superb @nature.com study from @dulaclab.bsky.social’s lab, led by @dingliu.bsky.social, shedding light on the neural circuitry underlying social homeostasis, centred around two hypothalamic cell populations.
Deep similarities with other physiological needs 🧪🧠
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sadly, today marks three years since russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I’m deeply grateful to those who continue to defend and support my homeland. Toronto stands with Ukraine! 💙💛
#StandWithUkraine

DeepLabCut has demonstrated high performance on professional skiers, but how does it handle snowboarders who spend more time eating snow than riding? 🤭
Despite a very small training dataset, the output is surprisingly promising! @deeplabcut.bsky.social

#PoseEstimation #Snowboarding

A crucial role for the cortical amygdala in shaping social encounters - Nature The posterolateral cortical amygdala and other connected brain regions have a key role in mediating the transition from investigative to aggressive behaviour in male mice.

A crucial role for the cortical amygdala in shaping social encounters
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Celebrating Women in Science with @sickkidsvs.bsky.social! 👩‍🔬👯‍♀️

Video reposted from www.instagram.com/reel/DF8Zz2n...

Am organizing a workshop this week @SimonsInstitute on Large language models, cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience and theory. Many excellent speakers. Can register here for livestream! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/ll...

Registration is OPEN!

Contextual cues facilitate dynamic value encoding in the mesolimbic dopamine system Fraser et al. demonstrate that contexts engage a model-based process that allows for rapid revaluation of reward-paired cues. They find that dopamine neuron activity is necessary for contexts to updat...

New paper out in @currentbiology.bsky.social with the inestimable @kurtfraser.bsky.social and @janaklab.bsky.social. We think this work illuminates an important way the brain dynamically orchestrates motivation, and look forward to testing new hypotheses this inspires in disease models.