Fabian Renz

How does the brain decide which mental strategy to use when inferring others' beliefs?

Excited to (finally!) see my first first-author paper out @natneuro.nature.com

Summary below 🧵 #CogSci #CogNeuro

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

BAMB! 2026 | Barcelona Summer School for Advanced Modeling of Behavior Intensive training for experienced researchers in cognitive science, computational neuroscience and neuro-AI. Five interconnected modules, expert faculty, hands-on projects. July 12-23, 2026.

You're still in time to apply to BAMB! and learn the art of modeling behavior with us! 🧠

The deadline is this Friday, March 6th.

Run! 🏃‍♂️💨

Apply here:
🔗 www.bambschool.org

Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy?

What does the term 'representation' mean to you?

We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields.

eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

BAMB! 2026 | Barcelona Summer School for Advanced Modeling of Behavior Intensive training for experienced researchers in cognitive science, computational neuroscience and neuro-AI. Five interconnected modules, expert faculty, hands-on projects. July 12-23, 2026.

Applications for BAMB! 2026 are officially open!

Join us in Barcelona (July 12–23) to master the art of behavioral modeling with our incredible faculty:

@meganakpeters.bsky.social
@marcelomattar.bsky.social
@khamascience.bsky.social
@thecharleywu.bsky.social

Apply now here: www.bambschool.org

Check out the latest from Sam HallMcMaster on the role of entorhinal cortex in factorizing representations and generalization

Infinite hidden Markov models can dissect the complexities of learning - Nature Neuroscience Bruijns et al. present a modeling tool that enables the tracking of learning dynamics across subjects to reveal how behaviors emerge and adapt. Applying the tool to a decision-making task in mice unco...

New in Nature Neuroscience: We developed a flexible model that reveals how animals learn tasks—uncovering stages, sudden insights, and gradual improvements unique to each animal.
Learning isn't monotonic, and our model captures that complexity 🐭📊
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Will there be an online option?

Happy to share this early Christmas present 🎄: our paper about geometry- and locomotion-dependence of 3D memory got published in PNAS! Joint work with co-first-author Volker Reisner (@reisnerv.bsky.social) as well as Leonard König, Misun Kim & Christian Doeller
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/

The effects of task similarity during representation learning in brains and neural networks Nature Communications - Here, the authors show learning tasks with similar structures can initially cause interference and slow down learning, but both the brain and artificial networks gradually...

Our new paper, now published in @natcomms.nature.com , asks a simple question: when two tasks share a common structure, does the brain learn them more efficiently? Surprisingly, this was not the case. Thread below (1/7)
rdcu.be/eSwvU

Just 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!

View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

Check out our new book chapter on non-invasive methods to study neural plasticity in humans - by @luiantaverra.bsky.social, @nicoschuck.bsky.social and me!
Link:
academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

🚨 I am over the moon 🌓 to announce that I am joining University College Dublin @ucddublin.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor this fall to start the Uncertain Mind (UMI) lab 💫

I am looking for PhD/Postdoc candidates to join (more below 👇 ). Please RT as the deadline is pretty soon 🙏

Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...

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/...

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...

N2 sleep promotes the occurrence of ‘aha’ moments in a perceptual insight task Sleep supports memory consolidation, but can it also facilitate memory reorganization? This study reveals that N2 sleep, but not N1 sleep during a nap, increases the likelihood of having an 'aha' mome...

Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by @anikaloewe.bsky.social & @maritpetzka.bsky.social. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
#compneuro #psychscisky

Impact of symmetry in local learning rules on predictive neural representations and generalization in spatial navigation Author summary The hippocampus is a brain region which plays a crucial role in spatial navigation for both animals and humans. Contemporarily, it’s thought to store predictive representations of the e...

Excited to share that our work on the interplay of symmetric learning rules and successor representations (SR) is published in @plos.org (comp.bio)

Work done together with @doellerlab.bsky.social, @caswell.bsky.social and Juergen Jost.

doi.org/10.1371/jour...
#neuroskyence #compneurosky

1/n

preprint alert 🚨
1/ Can we accurately detect sequential replay in humans using Temporally Delayed Linear Modelling (#TDLM)? In our recent study, we could not find any replay and decided to dig deeper by running a hybrid simulation with surprising results. Link to preprint & details below 👇

Hey neuroscientists: were you, your lab or any of your ongoing projects caught up in any of the latest NIH firings? You can find me on Signal at avaskham.54 if you want to chat. 🧪

#neuroskyence