Marcelo Mattar
@marcelomattar.bsky.social
2.1K followers 340 following 47 posts
Assistant professor at NYU.
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marcelomattar.bsky.social
Very cool! Looking forward to seeing what work will come out of this great team!
marcelomattar.bsky.social
Amazing! Congratulations, Luke!
marcelomattar.bsky.social
So happy to see this manuscript on biorxiv after so many years in the making! Thank you Matthieu for all your hard work, and @sreejan.bsky.social for all of the novel contributions and for pushing it through the finish line! And looking forward to comments from the community!
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
s-michelmann.bsky.social
🚀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
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
neuroai.bsky.social
What are your pros/cons of using AI in science?

Feel free to respond wrt use or harm in the design of experiments, coding experiments, coding analysis, brain storming analysis, summarizing literature, synthesis of ideas, modeling, novel model development, mathematical proofs, writing, editing.
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
dengpan.bsky.social
🚨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.
marcelomattar.bsky.social
I'm honored to serve as Expert Advisor for "The Alignment Project", an international initiative dedicated to ensuring AI systems are safe and beneficial. They are providing significant funding, compute, and collaboration opportunities for researchers---including those in cogsci/neuro. Please apply!
girving.bsky.social
I am very excited that AISI is announcing over £15M in funding for AI alignment and control, in partnership with other governments, industry, VCs, and philanthropists!

Here is a 🧵 about why it is important to bring more independent ideas and expertise into this space.

alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk
The Alignment Project by AISI — The AI Security Institute
The Alignment Project funds groundbreaking AI alignment research to address one of AI’s most urgent challenges: ensuring advanced systems act predictably, safely, and for society’s benefit.
alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
girving.bsky.social
I am very excited that AISI is announcing over £15M in funding for AI alignment and control, in partnership with other governments, industry, VCs, and philanthropists!

Here is a 🧵 about why it is important to bring more independent ideas and expertise into this space.

alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk
The Alignment Project by AISI — The AI Security Institute
The Alignment Project funds groundbreaking AI alignment research to address one of AI’s most urgent challenges: ensuring advanced systems act predictably, safely, and for society’s benefit.
alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
eringrant.me
Are similar representations in neural nets evidence of shared computation? In new theory work w/ Lukas Braun (lukasbraun.com) & @saxelab.bsky.social, we prove that representational comparisons are ill-posed in general, unless networks are efficient.

@icmlconf.bsky.social @cogcompneuro.bsky.social
marcelomattar.bsky.social
It's a very cool idea! Let's do it!
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
lhuntneuro.bsky.social
Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.
plosbiology.org
How do humans navigate unfamiliar environments? @denislan.bsky.social @lhuntneuro.bsky.social @summerfieldlab.bsky.social show that humans & deep meta-learning networks combine ‘vector-based’ & ‘transition-based’ strategies for flexible navigation in similar ways @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/45uSwNm
Task design and experimental set-up. Top left: underlying structure of the 8 × 8 grid, unseen by participants. Every state is represented by an image of an object, and these objects and their positions change on every trial. Top right: schematic diagram of the ‘map reading’ phase of each trial. Participants see a top–down view of the grid with objects obscured and successively click on blue squares to reveal ‘landmark’ objects at the location. After 16 clicks have been completed, a yellow square appears. Clicking on the yellow square reveals the ‘goal’ object for the trial. Bottom: schematic diagram of the navigation phase of each trial. Participants start in a random, previously unobserved location and are tasked with navigating to the ‘goal’ object they had just learnt about (displayed at the top). They can navigate in two ways. First, they could choose a direction to travel in by clicking on the corresponding arrow (highlighted yellow). This is analogous to using a ‘vector-based’ strategy. Alternatively, they could choose an adjacent state to travel to by clicking on one of the associated images (displayed in a random order; highlighted blue). This corresponds to using a ‘transition-based’ navigation strategy.
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
weijima.bsky.social
Thinking of applying to US-based Ph.D. programs in neuroscience, psychology, or cognitive science? We’ve got your back! NYU’s Application Support Group is a student-led, free mentorship program offering 1-on-1 support and guidance. Apply now! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
NYU Application Support Group Matching Form
Dear Prospective Neuroscience & Psychology PhD Students, We are a group of current NYU Neuroscience & Psychology PhD students who would like to help you with your PhD applications. We want to support...
docs.google.com
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
paulbsharp.bsky.social
🚨 Fully Funded PhD positions

Gonda Brain Institute, Sharp Lab

We will explore how people build and deploy world models efficiently for planning and decision making. We will also seek to characterize how world models construal and use is biased in anxiety.

Deadline: 1 Sept 2025. Please share!
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
nogazs.bsky.social
📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents.
Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656
And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
s-michelmann.bsky.social
Fantastic work by our (now former) lab manager Liv Christiano. We assess the test-retest reliability of OPM and compare it to fMRI and iEEG. 🧠📄🧵
oliviachristiano.bsky.social
How reliable is OPM-MEG, and how does it compare to other neuroimaging modalities? 🤔

In a new preprint with ‪@s-michelmann.bsky.social‬, we evaluate the reliability of OPM-MEG within & between individuals, and compare it to fMRI & iEEG during repeated movie viewing. 🧠

📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Reliability and signal comparison of OPM-MEG, fMRI & iEEG in a repeated movie viewing paradigm
Optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) offer a promising advancement in noninvasive neuroimaging via magnetoencephalography (MEG), but establishing their reliability and comparability to existing metho...
doi.org
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
oliviachristiano.bsky.social
How reliable is OPM-MEG, and how does it compare to other neuroimaging modalities? 🤔

In a new preprint with ‪@s-michelmann.bsky.social‬, we evaluate the reliability of OPM-MEG within & between individuals, and compare it to fMRI & iEEG during repeated movie viewing. 🧠

📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Reliability and signal comparison of OPM-MEG, fMRI & iEEG in a repeated movie viewing paradigm
Optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) offer a promising advancement in noninvasive neuroimaging via magnetoencephalography (MEG), but establishing their reliability and comparability to existing metho...
doi.org
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
neurozz.bsky.social
Excited to share a new preprint w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social! Why are there gradients of plasticity and sparsity along the neocortex–hippocampus hierarchy? We show that brain-like organization of these properties emerges in ANNs that meta-learn layer-wise plasticity and sparsity. bit.ly/4kB1yg5
A gradient of complementary learning systems emerges through meta-learning
Long-term learning and memory in the primate brain rely on a series of hierarchically organized subsystems extending from early sensory neocortical areas to the hippocampus. The components differ in t...
bit.ly
Reposted by Marcelo Mattar
marcelomattar.bsky.social
Very cool. Will the talk be recorded?
marcelomattar.bsky.social
Looks super interesting! Can't wait to read!
marcelomattar.bsky.social
YAY!!! I'm so happy for you, Anna! 🎉 Can't wait to see what your post-tenure research looks like! I'll be watching closely.