SchottdorfLab

State-space trajectories and traveling waves following distraction Cortical activity shows the ability to recover from distractions. We analyzed neural activity from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of monkeys performing working memory tasks with mid-memory-delay distract...

Let me google that for you :-) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Using the Churchland jPCA method. Worth reading in full

Our work with @pawa-pawa.bsky.social is out in Nature Machine Intelligence! The choice of activation function affects the representations, dynamics, and circuit solutions that emerge in RNNs trained on cognitive tasks. Activation matters!
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

MIT’s McGovern Institute and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences welcome new faculty member Sven Dorkenwald - MIT McGovern Institute The McGovern Institute and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences are pleased to announce the appointment of Sven Dorkenwald as an assistant professor starting in January 2026. A trailblazer i...

Excited to share more widely: I am starting the Dorkenwald Lab at MIT (McGovern Institute + BCS) in January 2026. We study the organizational principles of neuronal circuits using connectomics.

And we are hiring postdocs & tech associates! dorkenwaldlab.com/join

Even colleagues who should know better are claiming that we are halting animal research. No, we're not. Now this NYT opinion piece appears (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o... You can't just move everything to cell culture, organoids, and computers. Even this NYT piece admits that. 1/3

Mouse vs. AI: A Neuroethological Benchmark for Visual Robustness and Neural Alignment Visual robustness under real-world conditions remains a critical bottleneck for modern reinforcement learning agents. In contrast, biological systems such as mice show remarkable resilience to environ...

🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE!

We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like.

Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge!

Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

From the popular series "Figures that look like Kraftwerk Albums". Fig. 3 in Georgopoulos et al. Science 1986. Contributions of individual neurons to a shared coding direction in state space — pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3749885/

Working memory expands shared task representations in cortex Cognition is thought to emerge from the flexible organization of neural activity, yet how this organization reconfigures across behaviors varying in cognitive load remains unclear. We investigated how...

Using calcium imaging with single cell resolution across brain areas while mice solve two VR navigation problems, we discovered that neural manifolds can change in size based on working memory demands! Check out Mika Diamanti's amazing work: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Working memory expands shared task representations in cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679345v1

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS!

@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social
@cellpress.bsky.social

By me +
Hanna Hillman

We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue

Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

(1/8) New paper from our team!

Yu Duan & Hamza Chaudhry introduce POCO, a tool for predicting brain activity at the cellular & network level during spontaneous behavior.

Find out how we built POCO & how it changes neurobehavioral research 👇

arxiv.org/abs/2506.14957

Hm. yesss. Great Nerd Sniping potential to do the math for TCRM. My hunch is that Eq. (2) in arxiv.org/html/2504.02... could be a great starting point to add the Dxy constraint. Would be a super cool extension of CRM

Our latest project find shared representations while controlling for confounds is out www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Check @s-michelmann.bsky.social 's thread for the executive summary. Code in python and matlab: github.com/s-michelmann... — Now is play time 👨‍💻

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

Hi Harrison, this would be hard to compare; you would need some sort of regularization for PSL. The secret sauce of CRM is this regularization. Without it, it's just plain old CCA.

Wonder what kind of innovations publicly funded science has generated? Look no further than the device you may be reading this post on! Touchscreens started as a NSF funded thesis project at the University of Delaware. Learn more at:

publicusaresearchbenefits.com/examples/202...

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

please re-post so we get more great stories in there!

COSYNE 2025 Rajan lab posters. Friday, March 28 - Poster Session 2: 2-043: Emergent small-group foraging under variable group size, food scarcity, and sensory capabilities by Zhouyang (Hanson) Lu, Satpreet H Singh, Sonja Johnson-Yu, Aaron Walsman, Kanaka Rajan 2-058: 'Modeling rapid neuromodulation in the cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus loop' by Julia Costacurta and Yu Duan (co-first), John Assad, Kanaka Rajan and Scott Linderman (co-senior) 2-060: 'Measuring and Controlling Solution Degeneracy across Task-Trained RNNs' by Ann Huang, Satpreet Singh, Kanaka Rajan Saturday, March 29 - Poster Session 3: 3-020: 'ForageWorld: RL agents in complex foraging arenas develop internal maps for navigation and planning' by Ryan Badman, Riley Simmons-Edler, Joshua Lunger, John Vastola, William Qian, Kanaka Rajan 3-109: 'Inhibition-stabilized disordered dynamics in mouse cortex during navigational decision-making' by Siyan Zhou, Ryan Badman, Charlotte Arlt, Kanaka Rajan, Christopher Harvey

Big showing from the Rajan Lab at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social!

We have posters on everything from multi-agent social foraging to neuromodulated neural networks. Catch us in Poster Sessions 2 & 3 🧠🤖

#Cosyne2025 #NeuroAI #CompSci #neuroskyence

Awake replay: off the clock but on the job Hippocampal replay is widely thought to support two key cognitive functions: online decision-making and offline memory consolidation. In this review, we take a closer look at the hypothesized link bet...

New opinion paper in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social with Dan Bendor, where we argue that rodent studies provide only marginal support for the idea that replay supports real-time decisions (e.g. planning). Fictive learning and memory tagging are more consistent w/evidence. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Fascinating article!

Great! Please let me know if you need any help. We built a little model too (code is in the same repo) but nothing as sophisticated as what you guys are going. Looking forward to seeing how well you'll do with natural scenes from the primate fovea in vivo :-)

Great initiative! We have published a dataset a few years ago with in vivo recordings in macaques to natural scenes close to the fovea. Could be useful: doi.org/10.12751/g-n... — I don't do much work in this field anymore, but if it is not too much work, I can try to reformat this.

Science must step away from nationally managed infrastructure Scientific data and independence are at risk. We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political…

Scientific data and independence are at risk: We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political interference.

By @neuralreckoning.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/policy/scien...

Do you want to build your own two photon microscope for in vivo imaging? We have made our design open: With complete building instructions, bill of materials, CAD designs — and even the optics simulations. Now peer reviewed: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Copy of Figure 3 from the linked paper.

How to guide a micropipette into mouse hippocampus using two-photon microscopy - great protocol paper by Kevin Gonzalez and the Losonczy Lab: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mapmaking in the mind: new research details how the brain builds mental maps of the world To see how cognitive maps form in the brain, researchers used a Janelia-designed, high-resolution microscope with a large field of view to image neural activity in thousands of neurons in the

Read more: www.janelia.org/news/mapmaki...

Latent circuit inference from heterogeneous neural responses during cognitive tasks - Nature Neuroscience The latent circuit model identifies low-dimensional mechanisms of task execution from heterogenous neural responses. This approach reveals a latent inhibitory mechanism for context-dependent decisions...

(1/5) Excited to share my work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social , out now in Nat Neuro! We show that RNNs use low-d latent circuit mechanisms for cognitive tasks. We find that context-dependent decisions in both RNNs and PFC arise from latent inhibitory mechanisms. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

oh wow! Well, if you ever find yourself wondering how to build one yourself, here are the instructions: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 😄 Now accepted and in print!

Screenshot from Fig. 1c of the paper in the link.

Cool experimental design by @simwieg.bsky.social's lab with optogenetics + calcium imaging: how place cells in CA1 are affected by stimulation of contralateral CA3. They observe less an induction of place fields but somewhat random shifts of existing place fields: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is legit - the organizers (including unions) are organizing. When I ask those in the know what we can do that will actually matter, the answer includes collective action of this type.

I'm joining @nancykanwisher.bsky.social and all the others for this Thurs 3p ET effort. I hope you do too!