Dr Matthew Nour

Also a good metaphor for "aligned" AI

🧠 How do transformers learn relational reasoning? We trained small transformers on transitive inference (if A>B and B>C, then A>C) and discovered striking differences between learning paradigms. Our latest work reveals when and why AI systems generalize beyond training data 🤖

🚨 Job adverts LIVE! 🚨

We want to understand how the brain supports abstract cognition in psychosis, using cutting-edge neuroscience.

Non-Clinical RA:
lnkd.in/eva-Zzfj

Clinical RA:
lnkd.in/eSgdad_F

Postdoc:
lnkd.in/eid8gtbR

Oxford University
Due June 23

Simpson’s gender-equality paradox | PNAS Several cross-country examinations have found larger gender differences in Western countries. More recently, it has been argued, from an evolutiona...

“The gender-equality paradox entails that countries with more equality have larger gender differences in behavior. Positive associations between equality & gender differences disappear or reverse when accounting for cultural clusters of countries. The paradox appears to be a methodological artifact”

🚨 Job adverts LIVE! 🚨

We want to understand how the brain supports abstract cognition in psychosis, using cutting-edge neuroscience.

Non-Clinical RA:
lnkd.in/eva-Zzfj

Clinical RA:
lnkd.in/eSgdad_F

Postdoc:
lnkd.in/eid8gtbR

Oxford University
Due June 23

How do cognitive maps fail? And how can this help us understand/treat psychosis? My lab at @oxexppsy.bsky.social is hiring a Postdoc tinyurl.com/2p935hhz and RA tinyurl.com/3myfpb78 to answer these questions in mouse models.
Here's why you might want to join: 🧵

2-The people: you’ll be part of an ambitious and highly collaborative team studying psychosis in humans and neural networks led by @mattnour.bsky.social at @oxfordpsychiatry.bsky.social @drrickadams.bsky.social at @ucl.ac.uk and @mariaeckstein.bsky.social at DeepMind

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 re...

New paper from our lab now in @nature.com . We show that our brains use basis functions or "building blocks" to navigate social interactions. Rather than tracking every individual separately, social information is compressed into patterns that can be flexibly combined. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📢 Register now: 🚨
The registration for the Computational Psychiatry Conference 2025 in Tübingen is now open - register and get the early bird discounts:
www.conftool.com/cpconf2025/i...
#CPConf2025

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Immediately top of the wish list. Fantastic stuff

Adverts coming soon.

If you're passionate about understanding the computational architecture of the mind and its breakdown in psychiatry, reach out now! Happy to jump on a call.

All jobs 4 years, at @ox.ac.uk

#ComputationalPsychiatry #Neuroscience #AcademicJobs #PostdocPosition #PhDPosition

A cellular basis for mapping behavioural structure - Nature Mice generalize complex task structures by using neurons in the medial frontal cortex that encode progress to task goals and embed behavioural sequences.

Part of an incredible cross-disciplinary effort:

Preclinical: @melgaby.bsky.social ( @nature.com paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... ) 🐭

ANNs: @drrickadams.bsky.social & @mariaeckstein.bsky.social (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...) 💻

Each with their own jobs opportunities ...

❗Post-doc (computational/cognitive)❗

You'll develop cutting-edge analyses bridging brain imaging, behaviour, and language.

Lots of scope to develop new methods (LLM-based) and experiments. You'll work closely with computational collaborators on the animal and neural network side (see below!).

❗Pre-doctoral fellow (clinical)❗

You'll be supported to lead a clinical fMRI study, and embedded within an academic psychiatry group studying neurobiology of psychosis.

Ideal for a junior doctor at the start of their academic journey, keen to learn! 4 years, potential PhD.

❗RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES❗

We're hiring for an ambitious @wellcometrust.bsky.social project exploring brain mechanisms of planning/inference in psychosis 🧠

Tackled at multiple scales: from single neurons to human behaviour/fMRI and neural networks.

Opportunities for 1 post-doc 1 clinical fellow 👀

Hope you'll forgive a quick thread as I take over as the new EiC of @elife.bsky.social

You're correct

Thanks! Great paper. As you ofc know, PEs come in many forms (reward/state; sensory/semantic, low/high level). Most tasks (mmn) measure v. low level PEs. We suggest narrative tasks might allow us to track PEs at higher levels of abstraction. No strong claims about cog maps and delusions here.

If Mismatch Negativity Is the Answer, What Is the Question? On the Nature of Predictive Coding Abnormalities in Psychosis

Comment on our recent paper challenging the link between MMN dysfunction and positive symptoms:

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

Thanks @mattnour.bsky.social

I may have missed it but cognitive map dysfunction is also unrelated to positive symptoms so far?

Our symposium on structure knowledge biases in psychopathology was accepted at #CPConf2025!

with
@mattnour.bsky.social
@mgarvert.bsky.social
@carocharp.bsky.social

Talks will span social learning, inductive inference in planning, language representation & map-based generalization.

Can't wait!

Obligatory to reference @kennethstanley.bsky.social and Joel Lehman's amazing book

www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Greatnes...

The government plan features a potentially controversial scheme to unlock public data to help fuel the growth of AI businesses. This includes anonymised NHS data, which will be available for “researchers and innovators” to train their AI models. The government says there would be “strong privacy-preserving safeguards” and the data would never be owned by private companies.

Curious to see how they plan to anonymise our NHS data for training ML models. I personally wouldn’t know how to start doing that

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Very excited to lead this work at @ox.ac.uk. We're developing computational tools for neuroimaging data and naturalistic behaviour, some based on LLMs. We hope these will yield new insights into the mechanisms of CNS drugs, neurobiology of psychosis, and human cognition more broadly.

Psychotropic Taxonomies: Constructing a Therapeutic Framework for Psychiatry Pharmacological interventions are a cornerstone of psychiatric practice. The taxonomies used to classify these interventions influence the treatment and interpretation of psychiatric symptoms. Disease-based classification systems (e.g., ‘antidepressant’ and ‘antipsychotic’) do not reflect the fact that psychotropic agents are used across diagnostic categories, nor account for the dimensional nature of both the psychopathology and biology of psychiatric illnesses.In this review we discuss the history of psychotropic drug taxonomies and their influence on both clinical practice and drug development.

Excellent review paper (by @rob-mccutcheon.bsky.social @mattnour.bsky.social & others)

Clearly lays out the historical challenges and future frameworks to guide drug development in psychiatry.

www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

Encoding innate ability through a genomic bottleneck | PNAS Animals are born with extensive innate behavioral capabilities, which arise from neural circuits encoded in the genome. However, the information ca...

In principle, ~10^15 bits needed to specify all connections in brain assuming any wiring diagram is possible

In practice, much less needed. Indeed innate behaviors must fit in the genome (~10^9 bits in humans)

So: GPT4 has enough parameters. Just not the right ones

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We're going all out to try and understand mechanisms of cognitive symptoms in psychosis - including human neuroimaging with @mattnour.bsky.social, computational work with @mariaeckstein.bsky.social and @drrickadams.bsky.social and mouse electrophys/optogenetics with me ... watch this space!

💥 Some POST DOC JOB news 👀... I'm very happy to say that @melgaby.bsky.social, @mattnour.bsky.social, @mariaeckstein.bsky.social and I have been awarded funding from @wellcometrust.bsky.social to look at how planning 📝and mental models of the world 🌍 are affected by psychosis...

There's a movement in neuroscience suggesting we should be pursuing bigger bets with larger teams. I think there's a case for doing a bit of this, but I think it's a bad idea to prioritise it for two reasons, and a good case for saying we should be moving in the exact opposite direction. 🧠🧪

We have a starter pack that we will continue to expand that represents the #MentalHealth and #Neuroscience research community.

Please let us know if we missed you!

#Psychology #AcademicSky #Research

go.bsky.app/6LKA9F4