Alireza Modirshanechi

Out today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations! 🎉🥳

High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics: a solvable model Computation in recurrent networks of neurons has been hypothesized to occur at the level of low-dimensional latent dynamics, both in artificial systems and in the brain. This hypothesis seems at odds ...

The firing of neural populations is high-dim even if their subthreshold activity is low-dim! This work by @bio-emergent.bsky.social and @haydari.bsky.social shows how, with a solvable model, a data analysis technique, and data from mouse visual cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Model-based exploration is measurable across tasks but not linked to personality and psychiatric assessments Scientific Reports - Model-based exploration is measurable across tasks but not linked to personality and psychiatric assessments

Publication alert! Our latest paper with @kristinwitte.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social is out in Scientific Reports: rdcu.be/eydDQ! We explore whether model-based exploration strategies can be used to capture individual differences. Curious how cognitive models meet personality science?

We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication.

At first, what we found was very confusing!

But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks

doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736

🧵

Congratulations! 🎉🥳

Excited to share a new project spanning cognitive science and AI where we develop a novel deep reinforcement learning model---Multitask Preplay---that explains how people generalize to new tasks that were previously accessible but unpursued.

Auditory cortex neurons that encode negative prediction errors respond to omissions of sounds in a predictable sequence Neurons encoding positive or negative prediction errors signal a mismatch between the expected and the experienced input. This study shows how neurons encoding negative prediction errors in the audito...

New
@plosbiology.org
paper:
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
We found neurons in rat auditory cortex that signal narrow predictions for specific tones.
Using omissions as a probe, we show that some neurons show frequency-specific expectations despite responding broadly to actual sounds. 🧵

🤖 AI that thinks like us

Researchers at @www.helmholtz-munich.de have developed Centaur, an artificial intelligence model that can simulate human decision-making with remarkable accuracy.

@bethgelab.bsky.social @modirshanechi.bsky.social

Read the whole story 👉 bit.ly/4kCi280

Preemptive Solving of Future Problems: Multitask Preplay in Humans and Machines Humans can pursue a near-infinite variety of tasks, but typically can only pursue a small number at the same time. We hypothesize that humans leverage experience on one task to preemptively learn solu...

@cogscikid.bsky.social has cool new work, in collaboration with Honglak Lee and Sam Hall-McMaster, on how humans solve multitask reinforcement learning problems by preemptively simulating paths to counterfactual goals:
arxiv.org/abs/2507.05561
He also shows that it works on challenging ML tasks.

What an exciting day for cognitive science with a double feature @nature.com including tiny models (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) and less tiny ones (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

Excited to see our Centaur project out in @nature.com.
TL;DR: Centaur is a computational model that predicts and simulates human behavior for any experiment described in natural language.

What a day. Our foundation model of cognitive science is out in Nature:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@marcelbinz.bsky.social's thread:
bsky.app/profile/marc...

Centaur is featured by the NYT:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/s...

We got featured in a Nature views:
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Just 1 week left to apply! 🙏 Pls share with anyone you think might be interested. If there are any Q's, get in touch!
👉 3x PhD position: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 2yr Postdoc position: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

🚀Join our team @tuda.bsky.social ! 🚀
I'm looking for 3 PhDs & 1 Postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu project “C4: Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture” to study learning across individuals, teams, and cultural timescales
👉 PhD: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Volatility-driven learning in human infants Infants estimate environmental volatility to learn optimally, with early individual differences linked to temperament.

Out now in Science Advances! We find that infants estimate environmental volatility to learn optimally, with early individual differences linked to temperament. This has be so much fun to work on and ended up being my favourite personal paper! So excited it's out!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Representational similarity modulates neural and behavioral signatures of novelty Novelty signals in the brain modulate learning and drive exploratory behaviors in humans and animals. While the perceived novelty of a stimulus is known to depend on previous experience, the effect of...

Stoked to be at RLDM! Curious how novelty and exploration are impacted by generalization across similar stimuli? Then don't miss my flash talk in the PIMBAA workshop (tmr at 10:30, E McNabb Theatre) or stop by my poster tmr (#74)! Looking forward to chat 🤩

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

And if you're not RLDM, you can check out our preprint here (tweeprint coming soon!):
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Looking forward to your thoughts and comments! ☺️

Attending #RLDM2025?
Come by our poster in the evening to talk about the sense of control, empowerment, and agency. 🧠🤖

We propose a unifying formulation of the sense of control and use it to empirically characterize the human subjective sense of control.

🧑‍🔬🧪🔬

Just 4 weeks until the abstract deadline for Curiosity, Information Seeking & Exploration - ciseconf.github.io/CISE_2025/

🗓️ 30th Sept-1st Oct
📍 Brown University
👥 Romy Frömer, @hayleydorfman.bsky.social, Ohad Dan, Matt Nassar, Tali Sharot & Jacqueline Gottlieb
👇 Speakers

Please submit & share!

1/ I'm excited to share recent results from my first collaboration with the amazing @anayebi.bsky.social
and @leokoz8.bsky.social !

We show how autonomous behavior and whole-brain dynamics emerge in embodied agents with intrinsic motivation driven by world models.

Congrats on the super cool work. :)
Just a heads-up that the link appears to be broken. :-?

📢 now out @natrevpsychol.nature.com In a new perspective w/ @davidnagy.bsky.social & @gergoorban.bsky.social, we reconcile a glaring problem in applying rate-distortion theory as a framework for human memory, integrating empirical findings across a host of human memory research 🧵👇

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Absence of Systematic Effects of Internalizing Psychopathology on Learning Under Uncertainty Difficulties in adapting learning to meet the challenges of uncertain and changing environments are widely thought to play a central role in internalizing psychopathology, including anxiety and depres...

🚨 New preprint alert!

Our project investigating the effects of internalizing and trait anxiety on learning under uncertainty is finally online 🐆🐅

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot:

"Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition"

(by Balaban & me)

relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...

Memory by a thousand rules: Automated discovery of functional multi-type plasticity rules reveals variety & degeneracy at the heart of learning Synaptic plasticity is the basis of learning and memory, but the link between synaptic changes and neural function remains elusive. Here, we used automated search algorithms to obtain thousands of str...

We just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This paper of Rachit is a super cool example:
bsky.app/profile/rach...