Quinn Lee

Professor at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor, in the field of neurocircuitry - Montréal, Quebec (CA) job with Université de Montréal | 12843808 Professor at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor, in the field of neurocircuitry involved in the production of complex behaviors

🚨Another PI job opening in the Neuroscience dept. at @umontreal.ca ! 🚨

www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Change-resistance distinguishes the representational geometries of human spatial memory and mouse CA1 in deformed environments Prior work has highlighted qualitative similarities between the neural instantiations of cognitive maps in rodents and memory-guided navigation in humans, suggesting a conservation of representational...

Trans rights are human rights.

Fresh work incoming: Here we quantitatively compare the representational geometry of mouse CA1 and human spatial memory during environmental deformations. Briefest TLDR: Human memory looks like a change-resistant version of mouse CA1.

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Huge congrats Dan!!

Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall!

My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵

Stereo olfaction underlies stable coding of head direction in blind mice - Nature Communications Stereo olfaction involves comparing odor differences between the two nostrils. Here, using neuronal recordings and a behavioral test, the authors demonstrate that blind mice use stereo olfaction to fo...

Excited to share the sequel to our 2022 paper! In this follow-up, we show that the stable head direction (HD) signals we reported in blind mice rely on stereo olfaction—that is, the comparison of odor info. between the two nostrils.

Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵highlights below

Beautiful work!! Congrats!!

Synaptic plasticity rules driving representational shifting in the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience Madar et al. report that behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not spike-timing-dependent plasticity, explains heterogeneous place fields shifting in the hippocampus. The probability of BTS...

BTSP, but not STDP, can account for place field changes in hippocampus, out in Nature Neuroscience today:

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

🧠📈 🧪

The dataset and code for our recent paper in Neuron (tinyurl.com/yc48d6vr) is online now!
The data is available on Zenodo (zenodo.org/records/1486...) and code on Github (github.com/jquinnlee/ge...). Big thanks to @markbrandonlab.bsky.social and @atkeinath.bsky.social on this effort! #neuroskyence 🧠

Looking forward to seeing you all in Montreal this week 🧠🧠🧠
Use #cosyne2025 so we can 👀 what you're up to!!

Global modules robustly emerge from local interactions and smooth gradients - Nature The principle of peak selection is described, by which local interactions and smooth gradients drive self-organization of discrete global modules.

1/ Our paper appeared in @Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... w/ Fiete Lab and @khonamikail.bsky.social .
Explains emergence of multiple grid cell modules, w/ excellent match to data! Novel mechanism for applying across vast systems from development to ecosystems. 🧵👇

Director of Research Innovation & Operations (DRIO) – Abundant Intelligences Application deadline: March 21, 2025

Position open for Director of Research Innovation & Operations at Concordia as part of the Abundant Intelligences (www.indigenous-ai.net/abundant/) project, which seeks to reshape AI with indigenous insights:

www.kbrs.ca/Career/17387...

Please share!!!

🧪 #MLSky

Very pleased to share our recent work, in which we use LLMs for automated discovery of interpretable models of animal behavior 🪰🐀🕵️‍♀️ that take the form of Python programs 🐍

See below for a summary of key results by
@pcastr.bsky.social!

It's finally out!

Visual experience orthogonalizes visual cortical responses

Training in a visual task changes V1 tuning curves in odd ways. This effect is explained by a simple convex transformation. It orthogonalizes the population, making it easier to decode.

10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115235

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12

🌟🌟🙌🙌🌟🌟

Eleanor Maguire, who died 4 January at age 54, pioneered the famous London taxi-driver study and naturalistic approaches for studying spatial and episodic memory in people.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/memory/remem...

Allez Shahab!! Ce sera une super classe en IA j’en suis sûr!!

A tale of two algorithms: Structured slots explain prefrontal sequence memory and are unified with hippocampal cognitive maps The algorithm of the prefrontal working memory system on sequence memory tasks is not well understood, whereas it is well understood for the hippocampal episodic memory system. This work shows a mathematical duality between working and episodic sequence memory. This leads to a computational understanding of sequence working memory—as structured activity slots. This theory algorithmically explains recurrent neural network (RNN) and prefrontal representations during sequence memory tasks.

Stellar new work lead by the inimitable James Whittington in Neuron that develops a new theory unifying episodic and working memory and explains diverse hippocampal and prefrontal data: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... w/Will Dorrell, @behrenstimb.bsky.social Mohamedy El Gaby

Sparsity of Population Activity in the Hippocampus Is Task‐Invariant Across the Trisynaptic Circuit and Dorsoventral Axis Evidence from neurophysiological and genetic studies demonstrates that activity sparsity—the proportion of neurons that are active at a given time in a population—systematically varies across the can...

New brief report now out in Hippocampus! We used functional molecular imaging to ask if activity sparsity in the hippocampus (dorsal to ventral DG, CA3 and CA1) depends on memory task performed. Turns out the pattern is identical across tasks! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
#NeuroSky 🧠🧪

Unifying Subicular Function: A Predictive Map Approach The successor representation has emerged as a powerful model for understanding mammalian navigation and memory; explaining the spatial coding properties of hippocampal place cells and entorhinal grid ...

Our latest preprint has landed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Fantastic work from @laurenb29.bsky.social and Will de Cothi showing how many of the cell types associated with subiculum (e.g. boundary vector cells, corner cells) can be understood as successor features. TLDR: SUB not CA1 is the SR

Wicked new pre-print from @atkeinath.bsky.social
More evidence for a unifying predictive framework of cognitive mapping in the mouse brain! Also first time I have seen reliable between subject differences in maps over protracted time. Nicely done!!

Really enjoyed reading this (esp back to back with the new preprint from @neurovium.bsky.social)! Seems like there is agreement that modularity and embodied problems in dynamic environments are interesting fronts to push on in the years to come.

The Dept. of Computing Science at the University of Alberta is hiring! The new hires in AI will be nominated for a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. We have 3 TT positions:

AI/ML/DL Theory: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...
AI + SWE: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...
Systems: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...

What are the brain’s “real” tuning curves?

Our new preprint "SIMPL: Scalable and hassle-free optimisation of neural representations from behaviour” argues that existing techniques for latent variable discovery are lacking.

We suggest a much simpl-er way to do things.
1/21🧵

How can biology teach us to design better AI?🤔
Our new paper, w Mike @drmichaellevin.bsky.social "Bio-inspired AI: Integrating Biological Complexity," explores how biological principles like adaptability, context-dependence, and hierarchical processing can inspire the next generation of AI.
🧵👇1/n

Thanks Tom!!

Want to be part of the NeuroAI community CSHL ?

Applications are open for outstanding graduate students in Artificial Intelligence to spend the summer at CSHL as NeuroAI Interns.

Deadline: Dec 10th, 2024. Please spread the word!

www.schooljobs.com/careers/cshl...

@cshlaboratory.bsky.social

I would also like to say a massive thank you to my mentors, friends and collaborators Alexandra Keinath and Mark Brandon. This project has been immensely rewarding and I am looking forward to building on this work soon in my own lab at the University of Alberta!

There is a lot in the paper, but I am happy to say the data is now online and the publicly available code and notebook demos (including the RSA and RatInABox methods) will be coming out soon! Dataset: zenodo.org/records/1399...

When we looked more closely at why this type of model did so well, we found it is because it predicts how the CA1 spatial code moves when you change geometry of the space.