Marcelo Mattar

Super excited about this work, led by @haoliu4391.bsky.social and @s-michelmann.bsky.social. Also grateful for the many insightful conversations in which Sebastian gradually convinced me that memory encoding requires retrieval—leveraging existing semantic knowledge to regenerate the experience.

The dataset from our Reason to Play paper is now available on Hugging Face! Also, make sure to check out Csabi's awesome video explaining our approach.

📢Have work to share with the computational and systems neuroscience community? Abstract submissions for #COSYNE2027 are now open. Deadline: 18 October 2026, 11:59 p.m. AoE Submit your abstract: www.cosyne.org/abstracts-su... #Neuroscience

📣 My lab at NYU currently has two open post-doc positions. We are interested in understanding perception, thinking, and hallucinations. We employ a range of cutting-edge techniques in human neuroscience (e.g., 7T fMRI, MEG, iEEG/DES) and computational approaches (e.g., DNN modeling).

New paper! @samiyousif.bsky.social and I opine on Cognitive Maps as a Medium for Thought....now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social We discuss what cog maps are and how they might interact with a Language of Thought. This was a fun one, spanning philosophy, cog sci, and rodent neurophysiology!

New paper from my lab! We show that the retrieval state is recruited during both episodic and semantic retrieval, but not for perceptual judgments, suggesting that the retrieval state tracks domain-general internal attention. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/3...

Excited to share that I'll be starting as a junior professor and Emmy Noether awardee at the University of Göttingen this October! 🥳 🚀 I'll be hiring #phd students and #postdoc across #machinelearning, #neuroscience and #cogsci: modirlab.github.io/open-positio... Please spread the word! 🙏

While I am sad to miss #CCN2026 our group will showing the cool stuff that we have been doing in the model-brain alignment space, including a selected talk by Angeliki! See list, including our fun gaming collaboration with the groups of @marcelomattar.bsky.social and @momchiltomov.bsky.social

Very excited to attend #CCN2026 this week and to present various projects from my lab! Here's a list of our posters and talks in case you'd like to see what we've been up to.

So thrilled to be joining the Psychology Department at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social as an assistant prof next summer! I'll be recruiting for PhD/postdoc to start in Autumn 2027, so if you're interested in using computational approaches to studying human cognition please get in touch!

Replay of procedural #memory is independent of the #hippocampus doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Our paper is out in @natmachintell.nature.com! We trained multiple RNNs to perform free recall. The best-performing ones learned a strategy akin to the memory palace technique. See thread below for more info. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).

Made this overview of the intellectual history leading up to today's LLMs for my course. Any "must-have" stepping stones I missed? #NeuroAI #compneurosky #neuroskyence

From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The 2026 volume of the Annual Review of Neuroscience is now online 🧠 The most read article is "Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is" by @marcelomattar.bsky.social and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social

During sleep, neurons in the hippocampus 'replay' past activity patterns. This is thought to underlie memory consolidation 🧠 After a busy day, how does the brain sort out what is worth replaying? 🤔 Check out this preprint 📃 from Tirole, Duvelle and Bendor for answers! doi.org/10.64898/202...

Ever wondered how the hippocampal cognitive map is read-out? @changmin-yu.bsky.social @zilong-ji.bsky.social with Jake & John, show that, during navigation, theta sweeps indicate remembered goal-directions (cf. current/next movements or perceptual targets) 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint! We show low arousal states promote hippocampal ripple genesis in sleep and wake. This bridges rodent work, where ripples predominate during sleep, with human studies reporting ripples during active behavior, identifying low arousal as a common mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A *super* exciting new paper from @lizsiefert.bsky.social!! Human hippocampal ripple rates track very closely with several indicators of low arousal, during both sleep and wake. This is probably the most compelling data I have ever been associated with.

1/ 🚨 New preprint: "Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist" Introducing AutoCog 🤖 — a fully autonomous AI system that runs the entire scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science to surface novel theories of human behavior 🧵

Check out @jonathannicholas.bsky.social 's new preprint measuring eye movements to infer individual memory retrievals during decision making, plus a cool RNN modelof that process. Can't express how excited I am about this new technique!

How do brains plan actions towards goals? To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵 Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉) 📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🧵 : 👇

Only one week left until our PhD application deadline @mpicybernetics.bsky.social. If you’re interested in the intersection of RL, RNNs, and analyses of neural & behavioral data from novel, cross-species foraging experiments, make sure to submit your application by June 15! #NeuroJobs More info👇

New preprint! 🚨 Work w/ Sangita Dandekar & Clayton Curtis at NYU during my PhD. We show how prefrontal & visual cortices coordinate to keep working memories alive via localized & long-range β-band dynamics. 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/5)

Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, which surface new mechanistic ideas and clear predictions for future experiments From Google Deepmind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint w/ @fredcallaway.bsky.social! How does the brain decide which computations to run? We combine rational meta-reasoning with a meta-learning algorithm to build a recurrent network that learns to select computations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Super proud to have contributed to this amazing team effort, led by @sreejan.bsky.social and @botoscsabi.bsky.social! We asked: Which AI models learn to play video games like humans, comparing both behavior and internal representations. The answer surprised us! Check out our paper and post below

Jeee 🐦‍⬛ I am very proud of our joint effort with @sreejan.bsky.social on the project "Reason to Play" LRMs show human-like rule discovery, and their hidden states predict human brain activity during gameplay 10x better than previous methods Interactive demo + paper: botcs.github.io/reason-to-pl...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Olivia R. Christiano and Sebastian Michelmann: Reliability and signal comparison of OPM-MEG, fMRI & iEEG in a repeated movie viewing paradigm doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

24-Hour Final Call for BAMB! 2026 ⏳ Join us in Barcelona (July 12–23) and learn from our expert faculty: @meganakpeters.bsky.social @marcelomattar.bsky.social @khamascience.bsky.social @thecharleywu.bsky.social Apply now: www.bambschool.org

1/ New preprint out! “Control of cortical population activity with patterned microstimulation.” We show that brief training with multi-electrode stimulation pulses is enough to steer prefrontal population activity along desired trajectories in awake macaques. tinyurl.com/3d6kv26w

Come be our colleague! The Center for Neural Science at NYU is accepting applications at the Assistant Professor level in computational neuroscience and/or neural engineering apply.interfolio.com/182074

News! I've joined the Astera Institute to lead its neuroscience based AGI research. Backed by $1B+ commitment over the coming decade, my team will explore novel, brain-inspired architectures and algos toward safe, efficient human-like AGI, working alongside Doris Tsao. 1/ astera.org/dileep-georg...

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety. Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment. 1

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

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions rdcu.be/eRVUk

Amazing opportunity!

Amazing postdoc opportunity!

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.

How terrific! Free in person summer school for future PhDs who want more quantitative training before grad school; happening at one of the best places in the world to pursue it (the Gatsby at UCL).

New preprint from the lab! A frontal motor circuit for economic decisions and actions: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We use a novel task in mice, cortex-wide imaging and optogenetics, NPX recording and modelling to reveal a circuit mechanism that transforms abstract decisions to spatial actions.

Thrilled to start 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS @ualberta.bsky.social + Amii.ca Fellow! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural & artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (speaking coginterp.github.io/neurips2025 & organising @dataonbrainmind.bsky.social)

Tiny recurrent neural networks for discovering cognitive strategies — a Tools of the Trade article by Li Ji-An #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great opportunity for PhD applicants this year!