Catrina Hacker

🚨 New preprint! Why do some insights from spikes translate to field potentials while others don't? In this paper we compare visual memory representations in spikes and LFPs to propose a general framework that answers this question. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵 (1/10) 🧠🟦 🧠💻

How do we remember an image after seeing it just once? 🧠🧪 Now out in @natcomms.nature.com: neurons in mid-level visual cortex (V4) carry signatures that predict successful one-shot recognition memory. Led by Grace DiRisio, w/ @marlenecohen.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78369-0

Do animals remember after months of hibernation? In new research from #BiologyLetters, Columbian ground squirrels retained spatial memories after nine months of hibernation, outperforming inexperienced squirrels by 41–98% in their first maze trial after waking doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... #Cognition

Limitations of pupil diameter as a proxy for modes of locus coeruleus activity: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... "baseline-evoked relationships of the pupil are not predictive of those in the LC, and vice versa."

Now out in Nature Comms! Grace DiRisio & @cxue.bsky.social's work spurred new directions for us, suggesting very different neural codes for one shot learning vs. attention/working memory/decision-making, with translational implications. Stay tuned! 🧪🧠🥳 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In the second story out today, @thetransmitter.bsky.social asked 17 neuroscientists what questions could remain unanswered if support for nonhuman primate research continues to decline. Their answers span cognition and other subfields. By Alissa de Chassey www.thetransmitter.org/what-if-nonh...

For this new series, @thetransmitter.bsky.social evaluated whether neuroscience still needs nonhuman primates & if alternative models are ready to replace them. Over the next few weeks, four articles will detail what we found—and what the loss of nonhuman primate research would mean. bit.ly/4AWPX4l

I'm thrilled to see my concept on the cover of @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social this month! It was a fun challenge to illustrate the overlapping brain networks underlying cognition and highlight the complexity that future cBCIs must navigate to restore mental function in real time 🧠

Does splashing water on your face when you're upset actually help? This week's post by Stephanie Uroda dives (pun intended) into how submerging your face in cold water may actually calm your nervous system during stress! Learn more here! pennneuroknow.com/2026/10/06/w... #PsychSciSky #SciComm 🧠🟦 🧪

If you are an undergraduate student interested in computational and systems neuroscience research, this is your chance to attend #COSYNE27 !!! Apply here for our undergrad travel grant tinyurl.com/cos27ugtravel deadline is Oct 30 (and if you are not an undergraduate, please help to spread the word!)

Preprint time! This is a cool one. Complex systems, be they neural nets, interacting genes, or power grids, can produce diverse dynamics-- things like point attractors, limit cycles, and chaos. The dynamic landscape you get depends on how elements interact. But those interactions can also change!

Our work recently online in Nature Neuroscience: a neural reason why we err more when juggling tasks nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02430-w 🧵 Switching between tasks for different goals is an important form of cognitive flexibility.

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: fantastic work by @cxue.bsky.social, Sol Markman et al who discovered a neural reason that performance suffers under cognitive load: “Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty”. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧵1/

Excited to share the lab’s first publication, co-led by talented postdoc Chuyi Su @chuyisu.bsky.social We leveraged cell type-specific optogenetics in the macaque cerebral cortex to elucidate the role of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in visual form processing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now out at PNAS! The final version includes a smart analysis suggested by a reviewer showing that biomarkers collected in blood track our neural population metrics. A very exciting connection between basic neurophys and translational approaches. Congrats to all! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint! Posterior cingulate is often linked to memory in humans but decisions in monkeys yet there's little consensus about its functional neuroanatomy. We recorded LFPs+single units in humans during matched value and memory based decisions, finding convergence in dorsal, but not ventral, PCC.

If you've heard of homing pigeons, you may know that historically they were used as messenger birds. But have you ever wondered how pigeons know where to go? Turns out, pigeons may use magnetic fields to navigate! Learn more in this week's post by Andrew Nguyen: pennneuroknow.com/2026/08/18/m...

This is really careful and compelling work by Kara examining how the brain adapts its decision-making processes to handle differing levels of uncertainty. It's a must read for anyone interested in the neural correlates of decision-making (and/or fans of MT)! #neuroskyence

Our latest profile is here! Dr. Lea Duncker (@leaduncker.bsky.social) uses statistical and theoretical approaches to study the neural basis of flexible behavior. Follow the link below to learn more! #StoriesOfWiN #WomenInNeuroscience www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202...

What does synapse position buy a neuron? We trained a dendritic network to place its own synapses on a covariance task. It clustered correlated inputs onto shared branches, and shuffling that placement destroyed performance while every weight stayed intact. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2607.24503 🧵-->

📣New paper! How does the sleeping brain help us to integrate new experiences while managing memories from the past? For his PhD work, @sabbaspoor.bsky.social recorded hippocampal ensembles in freely moving monkeys and found something unexpected. 🧵1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧠📈👩‍🔬#OpenAccess

I've loved watching this project develop over the last few years and I'm so excited to see @jacob-a-parker.bsky.social share it with the world! Highly recommended to anyone thinking about human behavior or interested in decision making/inference. #compneurosky #neuroskyence

Excited to share our review in @cp-neuron.bsky.social with @lauriebayet.bsky.social and @mickbonner.bsky.social! We describe how implementing principles from child development can advance the mechanistic plausibility and capacities of AI models We packed A LOT into this review, here's a quick 🧵

Out today! Our (w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social) review of the alignment between the C-HORSE model and the hippocampal structure learning literature. We find strong congruence with the model's key principles and propose several avenues for future investigation!

Now out at PNAS - congratulations to Ramanujan Srinath and the team! Ram's ability and willingness to connect all these data, models, and ideas has changed my thinking/interpretation of many findings. I suspect I will keep learning from this study for a long time. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Do people solve hard problems by first building a mental model, then searching for the best solution? With @gershbrain.bsky.social, our new manuscript suggests a different route: people often start by retrieving cached solutions, and scaffold representations around them. osf.io/preprints/ps...

To me, this is bigger than Alzheimer's disease. Neuronal population activity sits between biology and behavior. If we understand that level well enough, systems neuroscience can do more than explain behavior. It can diagnose, track progression, and maybe even identify treatment targets. 9/

I have always believed that ideas from basic systems neuroscience could eventually help people. But for years that felt more like hope than reality. But look! This is one of the most personally satisfying papers my lab has produced because we’re getting there. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵 1/

New reviewed preprint from @elife.bsky.social! Led by Han Zhang, we tested monkeys on 10+ object concept classification tasks and compared their behavior to humans and deep networks. Monkeys learned diverse categorization rules fast... elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

A huge congrats to @simonbohn.bsky.social for leading the charge on this substantial update to our paper exploring how visual cortex and medial temporal lobe contribute to the transformation from seeing to remembering. 🧠🟦 🧠💻

Our new preprint is out!! The human brain runs on ~20 watts. Computers and modern AI systems require vastly higher energy. This gap raises a fundamental question: how does the brain compute so efficiently? In our new study, we take a critical step toward measuring and understanding this directly 1/3

A must read for anyone interested in hippocampal ripples from an amazing team! 🧠🟦

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Congratulations to fantastic postdoc Ramanujan Srinath and former star tech Martyna Czarnik on their new paper on the neural basis of flexible generalization in Nature Communications today! 🥳 Stable readout of visual representations mediates flexible generalization www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It is bittersweet to share the last post I will write for @pennneuroknow.bsky.social. It has been a privilege to work with our writers over the past several years and to explore topics from dinosaur brains to dementia. If you don't already, follow their page for updates on new posts!

New work on the effects of psychedelics on hierarchical cortical propagations out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Counter to our expectations, psychedelics attenuated bottom-up propagations into the Default Mode Network across substances and species. Thread below:

Do animals perceive time differently from humans? Science chats with @singhal.bsky.social—a researcher whose team is using “timescapes” to understand how nonhumans experience the world. https://scim.ag/4xFs4wM

Neuroscientist here, who has talked about the US losing science ground to other countries: The biggest problem for generating future cures for brain diseases is the ongoing utter destruction of US basic neuroscience. It’s not about regulation.

Excited to share our new review in Trends in Neuroscience with Gouki Okazawa @gouki-okazawa.bsky.social : "The 'neat' and 'messy' in task-dependent neural geometry and computation" where we reviewed what we know about the 'task-manager' in the brain. A thread 👇

#NGG is proud to present our next Thesis Defense given by @catrinahacker.bsky.social of the @nicolecrust.bsky.social Lab! Please join us in person or virtually (DM us for the link) on 6/2. Best of luck, Catrina! #PhAlmostDone 🥳

New review with Cheng Xue at U Chicago @cxue.bsky.social in Trends Neurosci@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social! We discuss the neural geometry of task-dependent computation: disentangled encoding, RNN modeling, switch cost, etc. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

The research that led to this miracle drug started more than five decades (!) ago. Basic science research has massive payoffs but they are often very long-term. As a society, we invest in basic research for our kids and grandkids.

It’s very fun to analyze other people’s data for your favorite model and theory, but data reuse actually takes a huge amount of effort. We tested if current agentic AI can help with data reuse. Conclusion: it definitely can, but requires careful human supervision. #AIforScience #compneuro #neuroAI

New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10

Interesting! doi.org/10.1242/dmm.... "Debates about animal research & alternatives are often framed as a contest between old and new approaches. This framing is both misleading and counterproductive. In practice, modern biomedical research is increasingly characterised by methodological pluralism"

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My paper with @mikearcaro.bsky.social exploring the organization of the visual system in newborn infants is now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social !

Today on a special Earth Day episode of the pod, three environmental experts share stories about times when environmental action succeeded in saving the planet—and explain why this can be done again

📹 7-min talk on this work: vimeo.com/1179294328

🎯New preprint! The resource-rational dynamics of evidence accumulation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Evidence accumulation isn’t stationary. It is dynamically controlled to trade off information gain against cognitive effort. With Jiang Mao, Tobias Donner @donnerlab.bsky.social, Alan Stocker

Super excited to share this preprint! How do we disentangle underlying structure from the particular features of a learning episode to benefit future learning? We find that memory reactivation during sleep promotes this structure abstraction process. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...