Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Seongmin Park @seongminpark.bsky.social · Jul 10

🚨 We’re hiring! The Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Virginia Tech is looking for a postdoc to join our team studying the neural + computational mechanisms of structure learning and flexible cognition: ccnvt.github.io#positions

CCN Lab

ccnvt.github.io

1 19 29

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · May 12

New Paper: Continuous Thought Machines

pub.sakana.ai/ctm/

Neurons in brains use timing and synchronization in the way that they compute, but this is largely ignored in modern neural nets. We believe neural timing is key for the flexibility and adaptability of biological intelligence.

Thread ↓

4 29 130

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Lucina Uddin @lucinauddin.bsky.social · May 12

Check out our new special issue on cognitive flexibility @coolscontrol.bsky.social: authors.elsevier.com/a/1l4vl8MqMi...

authors.elsevier.com

9 37

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Datta Lab @dattalab.bsky.social · May 9

Maps are everywhere in the brain...and finally we've discovered one in the nose! Led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social, we uncovered the logic that specifies the positions of each of the 1,000 sensory neuron subtypes in the nose and aligns their projections to the brain.👇👃see more details below👃👇

A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain

Although topographical maps organize many peripheral sensory systems, it remains unclear whether olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) choose which of the ~1100 odor receptors (ORs) to express based upon t...

www.biorxiv.org

5 52 150

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Mar 28

What a terrific idea.

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Jascha Achterberg @achterbrain.bsky.social · Mar 23

Looking for an exciting fellowship in AI & Neuro, with competitive salary (~£100k)? We got a new position in the lab at Oxford, working with @somnirons.bsky.social and me! 🧪

Our project: encode.pillar.vc/projects/beh...

General info: encode.pillar.vc

#compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience #sciencejobs

ARIA Opportunity Space: Scalable Neural Interfaces

encode.pillar.vc

1 26 41

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Tristan Yates @tristansyates.bsky.social · Mar 20

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants

Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

www.science.org

21 170 480

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

AntonioFR @antferrui.bsky.social · Mar 17

Excited to share our latest story! We found disentangled memory representations in the hippocampus that generalized across time and environments, despite the seemingly random drift and remapping of single cells. This code enabled the transfer of prior knowledge to solve new tasks

6 57 140

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Hayoung Song @hayoungsong.bsky.social · Mar 13

If you are curious about the brain🧠 on causal inference, insight💡, memory retrieval, and narrative comprehension🎬, this will be the one.

work by dream team @jinke.bsky.social Rhea Madhogarhia @ycleong.bsky.social @monicarosenb.bsky.social ⭐

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Mar 13

Cortical reinstatement of causally related events sparks narrative insights by updating neural representation patterns https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.12.642853v1

1 16 32

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Nature @nature.com · Mar 13

Nature research paper: Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex

https://go.nature.com/3FsvUTi

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 represent patterns of social interaction.

go.nature.com

10 34

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Riccardo Fusaroli @fusaroli.bsky.social · Mar 12

How did early human symbolic behavior evolve? osf.io/preprints/ps... Can we use cultural transmission chains to explore how humans were using and producing the 40k-year of engravings from Blombos & Diepkloof? W Pagnotta Tylén @felixthehauskat.bsky.social & others. A thread:

2 13 49

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Nadira Faber @nadirafaber.bsky.social · Mar 12

Our paper in Nature (@mkwittmann.bsky.social et al.): the brain does not only process the *identity* of a person but primarily our *relationship* to them. Even on a neural level, who someone is *in relation to others* is key. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #neuroskyence

2 42 140

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Liset M. de la Prida @lmprida.bsky.social · Feb 26

New from the lab!! 👉🏼 authors.elsevier.com/a/1kgT43BtfH... 📝 @cellpress.bsky.social We discovered that genetically-defined neuron types in the hippocampus form unique manifolds! Dual color imaging, chemogenetics and topological analysis all at once! With Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social

4 32 90

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · Feb 23

Averaging brain responses is not a great idea...
#neuroscience #neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

8 31 150

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Feb 9

Computation-through-Dynamics Benchmark: Simulated datasets and quality metrics for dynamical models of neural activity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.07.637062v1

5 11

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Dorsa Amir @dorsaamir.bsky.social · Jan 25

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

33 420 1.1K

Reposted by Apoorva Bhandari

Jae-Young Son @jaeyoungson.bsky.social · Aug 2

Cool new work from my labmate Alice!

PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · Aug 2

Knowledge of information cascades through social networks facilitates strategic gossip: http://osf.io/yq82d/

3 4

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Aug 3

New paper with Alice Xia, Yang Teoh and Oriel FeldmanHall.

PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · Aug 2

Knowledge of information cascades through social networks facilitates strategic gossip: http://osf.io/yq82d/

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Mar 9

Please do share your feedback and thoughts, and repost!

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Mar 9

This is the hardest project I've worked on: extensive methods development, painstaking piloting, writing two grants, intensive data collection, and a LOT of thinking. It needed a huge dose of patience as we carried its burden over many years. A bit like Frodo carrying the ring.

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Mar 9

Collectively, studying representations of two different task structures in the same subjects revealed generalizable principles by which lPFC tailors representations to different tasks.

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Mar 9

The flat task showed local high-dim structure and orthogonality across clusters that were unrelated to the structure of the task. These may have been vestiges of an expressive, task-agnostic representation. Such a process has been observed in monkey lPFC www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Learning shapes neural geometry in the prefrontal cortex

bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

www.biorxiv.org

1

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Mar 9

However, there were clues in the data suggesting lPFC may have started with a task-agnostic, high-dim representation with learning-driven dimensionality reduction helping reshape it to fit the task structure.

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Mar 9

Therefore, at least in highly trained subjects, lPFC learned task-tailored representations that recapitulated the structure of the task, showing that lPFC representations are shaped by representation learning.

Apoorva Bhandari @apaxon.bsky.social · Mar 9

On the other hand, in the flat task, a global axis encoded the response-relevant, XOR categories abstractly. Category-specific local geometries were high-dimensional, retaining stimulus information that was not strictly required for readout.