Mohamady El-Gaby

Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social!
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.

Neuronal spiking in the mammalian forebrain is dominated by a heterogeneous ground state Neuronal firing patterns have significant spatiotemporal variability with no agreed-upon theoretical framework. Using a combined experimental and mode…

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅
Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter...

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

A must read for anyone interested in the social brain.

We review studies showing that when brain areas face similar computational demands in social and non-social context, they perform the same computations. We argue that exaptation (repurposing of traits for new functions) played a key role in brain evolution.

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊

Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules.

Led by Dammy Onih!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cosyne Viewing Parties

Visas, costs, care responsibilities, and environmental concerns all limit Cosyne attendance. Luckily, the talks are livestreamed; but watching alone is the high road to an aneurism. Hence: viewing parties! Gather regionally to watch Cosyne talks! More info: shorturl.at/3DHZX.

Hybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning - Nature Human Behaviour Using artificial neural networks applied to human data, Eckstein et al. show that good models of reinforcement learning require memory components that track representations of the past.

Hybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New discovery! Value-based decisions reorganize neural state space. Options are first encoded in orthogonal subspaces Then the selected option rotates into a "readout subspace".
Neural subspace reorganization reflects value-based decision making.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#neuroscience

*Multi-region computations in the brain*
When two regions are better than one...
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#neuroskyence

It’s PhD defence season. Here is a short guide on how to ace these.

The hippocampus is not a library, it is a simulation engine.

HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories.

This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial for planning.

A🧵with my toy model and notes:

#neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

Do you need your toes to think?

YESS!

Happy to see this one out 😎!

From your humble toes to your noble neurons, you need all your cells to solve your most important problem :

How to stay alive 😎😅

Elena Gutierrez , @sandra-neuro.bsky.social and @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social

If you attended our SfN symposium on cognitive maps in the PFC then here’s a recap of what was covered. If you didn’t then here’s what you missed! TLDR: converging evidence for structured representations of the world and task in the PFC in humans NHPs and rodents. Led by @sebves.bsky.social and…

🥳!!NEW PREPRINT!!🥳

We show that the tendency to compress complex social information into priors about social structures becomes more pronounced during adolescence.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am soooooo excited to share this work, together with @mkwittmann.bsky.social and @yongling.bsky.social.

In Buzzy Papers we set out to compile some of the most exciting neuroscience papers published in the past two years! A panel of 10 neuroscientists selected the papers from a preliminary list our editorial team assembled by considering publications in top neuroscience journals

Postdoctoral Scientist- Kim and Abdus-Saboor Lab Primary Work Address: Dept of Molecular Biology, Princeton, NJ, 08544 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. The Kim Lab at Princeton University and Abdus-Saboor Lab at ...

Come do a joint postdoc with me and @tinakim-neuro.bsky.social, splitting your time between Princeton and Columbia. Come design new activity-dependent labeling enzymes and transcriptional reporters optimized for application in the peripheral nervous system.
hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Our new preprint: The primate hippocampus parses experience into event-aligned neural states, creating a temporal scaffold for organizing behavior.

At #SfN25 ? Come chat at my poster — Wednesday AM (PP14; 414.03).

Different learning algorithms achieve shared optimal outcomes in humans, rats, and mice Animals must exploit environmental regularities to make adaptive decisions, yet the learning algorithms that enabels this flexibility remain unclear. A central question across neuroscience, cognitive science, and machine learning, is whether learning relies on generative or discriminative strategies. Generative learners build internal models the sensory world itself, capturing its statistical structure; discriminative learners map stimuli directly onto choices, ignoring input statistics. These strategies rely on fundamentally different internal representations and entail distinct computational trade-offs: generative learning supports flexible generalisation and transfer, whereas discriminative learning is efficient but task-specific. We compared humans, rats, and mice performing the same auditory categorisation task, where category boundaries and rewards were fixed but sensory statistics varied. All species adapted their behaviour near-optimally, consistent with a normative observer constrained by sensory and decision noise. Yet their underlying algorithms diverged: humans predominantly relied on generative representations, mice on discriminative boundary-tracking, and rats spanned both regimes. Crucially, end-point performance concealed these differences, only learning trajectories and trial-to-trial updates revealed the divergence. These results show that similar near-optimal behaviour can mask fundamentally different internal representations, establishing a comparative framework for uncovering the hidden strategies that support statistical learning. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Wellcome Trust, https://ror.org/029chgv08, 219880/Z/19/Z, 225438/Z/22/Z, 219627/Z/19/Z Gatsby Charitable Foundation, GAT3755 UK Research and Innovation, https://ror.org/001aqnf71, EP/Z000599/1

paper🚨
When we learn a category, do we learn the structure of the world, or just where to draw the line? In a cross-species study, we show that humans, rats & mice adapt optimally to changing sensory statistics, yet rely on fundamentally different learning algorithms.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for our ability to rapidly and flexibly adapt our behavior in new environments based on our previous experience. Despite its importance, the neural substrates a...

1/ Excited to share that our symposium review covering cognitive mapping in the PFC just came out in the Journal of Neuroscience: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

Come find out all about cognitive maps in the PFC!!

Sosa Lab - Postdoctoral Researchers We are seeking postdocs to start in 2026!

The Sosa Lab is going to #SfN25 and actively recruiting ✨postdocs✨ with systems neuroscience experience! We study both fundamental memory processes and how memory changes during pregnancy and postpartum.

If you are interested in meeting at SfN, please email me! www.sosaneurolab.com/join/postdoc...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Not sure how I missed this. Congrats on having this out!

This is elegant work!

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...

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

This might be one of the coldest photos taken in neuroscience history.

Linking neural population formatting to function Animals capable of complex behaviors tend to have more distinct brain areas than simpler organisms, and artificial networks that perform many tasks tend to self-organize into modules (1-3). This sugge...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵
#neuroskyence
1/

🚨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.