Dimitra Maoutsa

I’ll be presenting my work at #COSYNE2026. Stop by our poster to come learn about how the geometry of neural population activity shapes communication between brain areas during learned behavior 🐦‍⬛🧠🎶

Excited to give a talk at #Cosyne2026 about my PhD work!

We show that RNNs trained on visual search converge on brain-like solutions, producing primate-like behavior and neural representations. Happy to chat if you're at Cosyne!

📅 March 15, 2026
📍 Lisbon, Portugal
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper Last year, we wrote about a Walsh Medical Media journal that refused to withdraw an author’s paper unless he paid a fee — even though he didn’t write or submit the article. For one reader, some details of that story were familiar. Laertis Ikonomou, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo in New York, … Continue reading Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper

Lol. This is academic publishing taken to its logical end.

https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/05/publisher-demands-500-from-impersonated-author-to-retract-paper/

Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

RIP redundancy reduction?

Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The most sensitive inputs to cutaneous representing regions of primary somatosensory cortex do not change with behavioral training - PubMed Learning a sensory detection task leads to an increased primary sensory cortex response to the detected stimulus, while learning a sensory discrimination task additionally leads to a decreased sensory cortex response to the distractor stimulus. Neural responses are scaled up, and down, in strength, …

Some people have written about how these two ideas may not be mutually exclusive.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26634900/

As a result, we suspect the same neurons can exhibit different levels of stability to different stimuli based on network connectivity (as opposed to stimulus complexity/dimensionality). Just a hunch at this point, but seems plausible enough. More in this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How are neural manifolds and single-neuron response properties related to circuit structure?

How degenerate are these relationships?

Theory and a plethora of examples can be found in the following paper, out today in Neuron 🌟

It was a privilege to co-supervise first author @lpezon.bsky.social!

3. We find that the circuit structure
– can impose symmetries on the network's low-dim. dynamics
– constrains the topology of the set of all single-neuron responses.
From the second point, we pinpoint topological features of neural activity relevant for comparing it with models.

Linking neural manifolds to circuit structure in recurrent networks Dimensionality reduction methods are widely used in neuroscience to investigate two complementary aspects of neural activity: the distribution of sing…

Excited to share our new paper to be published in Neuron!

With Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social and Wulfram Gerstner @gerstnerlab.bsky.social, we explore how circuit structure in RNNs shapes network computation and single-neuron responses.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Orbitofrontal circuits for context-gated reward predictions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.05.709962v1

Functional reorganization of motor cortex connectivity during learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.03.709199v1

it's out!

@hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place.

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Enjoyed writing this with the wonderful philosopher Bill Ramsey

The cortex generates invariant dynamic primitives; the cerebellum reconfigures them to drive distinct policies.

Huge congrats to first author Martha Garcia-Garcia for leading this tour de force, and @somnirons.bsky.social & Michal Wojcik for a great collaboration!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How does the brain generalize past experiences without confusing memories? 🧠

Our lab's newest preprint reveals a fundamental division of labor between the cortex and cerebellum that solves this problem. (Check out the cortex-cerebellum video below! 👇) 🧵

CfA: Workshop “Philosophical Issues in Neural Computation” (@ruhr-uni-bochum.de) Jun 2–3 2026.

Deadline: March 31.

Further Speakers: @adriendoerig.bsky.social, @francesegan.bsky.social, @olivia.science, @gualtiero.bsky.social, @seelikat.bsky.social, Oron Shagrir.

Information theoretic measures of neural and behavioural coupling predict representational drift Author summary Activity in the brain represents information about the outside world and how we interact with it. Recent evidence shows that these representations slowly change day to day, while memori...

Out now in @plos.org CB: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Neural representations of tasks change over time, even in the absence of changes in task performance. But neurons change tuning at different rates. How does a neuron's stability relate to its interactions with the population?
#compneuro #neuroskyence

Cell types: encoding the brain's BIOS Inferring the structure of primary rewards from connectomics

What are cell types good for, computationally? Encoding innate behavior! In this 2-parter, I break down the relationship between cell types—which I had, in years prior, dismissed as mere implementation detail—and computation. I changed my mind!

www.neuroai.science/p/cell-types...

A drawing on the cover of the journal Neuron. Each section of the fan has a drawing of a mouse. Each mouse has a slightly different pose. The tassel of the fan resembles a neuron.

My first cover of 2026
"Spontaneous behavior is a succession of self-directed tasks"
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
#sciArt #Scicom #illustration #neuroskyence

📣 Excited to announce the 2nd edition of our workshop
“Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Theory, Autonomy, Embodiment & Environment”
at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #CoSyNe2026!!
🧠🤖🌍🪰🐟🐭💪🧘🏃

🗓️ March 17, 2026
📍 Cascais, Portugal
🔗 Speaker lineup and schedule: neuro-agent-models.github.io

Excited to announce the Paris Bernstein Node, aiming to foster interactions between Paris-based computational neuroscientists and the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social. Founded with Paris-based PIs and welcoming new members!
bernstein-network.de/en/network/b...

Yesterday we said goodbye to our beloved kitty Coco. We miss her terribly but I am glad I was able to immortalize her in Figures 1 and 2 of my 2021 Synthese paper. Hopefully she will meet Fodor's Greycat in kitty heaven.

NEW: #Kempner researchers develop a mean-field theory of task-trained RNNs that bridges random and learned connectivity—and find macaque motor cortex is best captured by an intermediate, task-specific recurrent structure.
Read the blog post 👇
🔗 bit.ly/47f3Ldl

I have previously received the gentle feedback that extremely long and detailed tweet threads should "just be blog posts." We have taken this to heart:
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/research/dee...

𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆
Another mega paper that deserves close attention.
Lots of implications, including emergence and evolution
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
#complexity

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Structure, disorder, and dynamics in task-trained recurrent neural circuits https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.708943v1

Visuomotor coordination on the road: low-dimensional representations reveal adaptive, context-dependent reductions in the dimensionality of natural driving behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.28.707665v1

Of the Structural Pressures That Silence Academics Since their inception, universities have been regarded as lighthouses guiding the storm-tossed ship of society. These institutions, tasked with generating ideas that shape and secure the future of soc...

The hierarchical structure of academia is built on trust. However, it can be abused in ways that unfairly harm the careers of ECRs. In our latest ecrLife post, Ali Farrokhi and Angel Cisneros discuss how increased accountability could help limit abuse of academic hierarchies.
tinyurl.com/2zfxzasf