#JNeurosci: Results from Hall-McMaster, @nicoschuck.bsky.social, @gershbrain.bsky.social et al suggest the entorhinal cortex might highlight aspects of past experiences that can be generalized, allowing us to make effective decisions in new environments https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1492-25.2025
Terrific work led by @emmaroscow.bsky.social showing that hippocampal replay reflects events with large prediction errors, all the better to bootstrap learning as we slumber
Congratulations to Matt Jones & Nathan Lepora for seeing this through to the end!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Fresh from the press 🍃
In this article, we put forward a framework for understanding goal-directed and habitual control. We propose how interactive loops in the brain & shortcuts between them may shape our behavior – and that of Transformers. Looking forward to your thoughts💡
doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
Thanks for this collaborative effort, Claudia Ebrahimi, @endrass.bsky.social, @ldeserno.bsky.social, and all other coauthors!
While we cannot draw causal conclusions based on this study design, I found it fascinating that a relatively short task allows to predict real-life control over drinking.
9/9
…were less successful at drinking less than usual when they intended to do so during the following months. Put differently, they were worse at putting their drinking reduction intentions into practice.
8/9
People who behaved in a less goal-directed manner on the task and who had less pronounced hippocampal correlates of model-based RPE components…
7/9
In 67 participants with AUD who performed the two-step task during fMRI and were then tracked using smartphone-based ecological momentary assessments for up to one year, we found evidence for this idea.
6/9
Can we predict control over alcohol intake in the day-to-day life of individuals with AUD based on how goal-directedly they behave on the classic two-step task and how strongly they encode model-based prediction error components?
5/9
We thus moved away from looking at group differences, and instead asked:
4/9
…but there’s no consistent evidence for categorical differences in goal-directed behavior between individuals with and without AUD diagnosis.
3/9
This longitudinal project focused on alcohol use disorder (AUD). That’s because increased habitual and decreased goal-directed control have been suggested to underly addiction,…
2/9
Ever wondered whether goal-directed behavior on lab-based tasks and its neural correlates can predict behavior in day-to-day life? We did too and our study is finally out in Translational Psychiatry! 🧠
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
1/9
The official 2026 Psychology and Brain meeting website is now online!
Save the date: June 4 – 6, 2026 in Heidelberg, Germany
More information to follow shortly on the website. We already have some awesome keynotes lined up.
pug2026.org
@biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social @igor-dgps.bsky.social
🧠🚨 How does the hippocampus transform the visual similarity space to resolve memory interference?
In this new preprint, we found that the hippocampus sequentially inverts the behaviorally relevant dimensions of similarity 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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...
🚨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.
Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social
#compneuro #neuroskyence
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
For anyone wondering why preprints are suddenly offline! Would be useful if the redirect message said something more useful than ‘page not found’…
New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex.
rdcu.be/eAofi
Just uploaded the preprint 📄 for this project!
„The successor representation in high-risk drinking and alcohol-related contexts“
Check it out at osf.io/preprints/ps...
Entorhinal cortex signals dimensions of past experience that can be generalised in a novel environment https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.01.668096v1
🌍 Ready to take your research career to the global stage? Whether you’re pursuing a #PhD, #Postdoc, or #Professorship — #Berlin is your next stop! Check out our new Global Scholars’ Gateway, your one-stop-shop for research opportunities in Berlin! 👉 www.berlin-university-alliance.de/en/commitmen...
Super excited to contribute to this book with our chapter "Enhancing Ecological Validity in Habit Research via Naturalistic Methods" (with Elizabeth Tricomi). Thanks, @dvsmith.bsky.social, @thepsychologist.bsky.social, and @dfareri.bsky.social for organizing!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🚨 New paper alert!
Do time constraints reveal habitual behaviour? 🤔 We directly compared two major paradigms in the habit research field (Outcome Devaluation vs Response Remapping) under identical training and forced-response conditions 🧠 ⏲️ ⌨️
preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Preprint will follow soon 📃
This project (doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/9TUZE) was a collaboration with Sam Hall-McMaster, Kanji Shimomura, @ayakak.bsky.social, Lukas Bode, @clarissagrundmann.bsky.social, Claudia Ebrahimi, Kenji Morita, @gershbrain.bsky.social, @endrass.bsky.social, and Florian Schlagenhauf
Excited to present our latest findings on what role the successor representation plays in high-risk drinking and alcohol-related contexts at #CPConf2025!
Come by at poster 2.31 on Tuesday to discuss how the SR fits in with the habit account of addiction 💭
www.cpconf.org
This sounds incredibly interesting!
