Noor Sajid

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

(Keynote #4) Alison Gopnik - "Empowerment and Causal Learning in Humans and Machines" YouTube video by MAIN Conference

My talk at the terrific MAIN (Montreal AI and Neuroscience) meeting on cognition, neuroscience and AI linking Bayesian causal learning and empowerment in reinforcement learning.
youtube.com/watch?v=qrwB...

Different types of syntactic agreement recruit the same units within large language models Large language models (LLMs) can reliably distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, but how grammatical knowledge is represented within the models remains an open question. We investigate ...

How do LLMs process syntax? Do different syntactic phenomena recruit the same model units, or do they recruit distinct model components? And do different languages rely on similar units to process the same syntactic phenomenon?

Check out our new preprint (to appear at ACL 2026)!
shorturl.at/QWU81

📣 Calling experimental, computational, or theoretical researchers!

WTI's Postdoc Fellowships application is now open, offering a competitive salary, structured mentorship, world-class facilities + more: wti.yale.edu/initiatives/...

Apply by November 10: apply.interfolio.com/174525

#KnowTogether

Want the freedom of a fancy fellowship, but not the year-long wait or arduous application?

Come join my lab! Work on neuroscience and AI, explore your creativity, be independent or work closely with me, collaborate widely, and have a lot of fun!

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Benchmarking World-Model Learning Model-learning agents should gather information to learn world models that support many downstream tasks and inferences, such as predicting unobserved states, estimating near- and far-term consequence...

arxiv.org/abs/2510.19788

I did a QA with Quanta about interpretability and training dynamics! I got to talk about a bunch of research hobby horses and how I got into them.

Assistant Professor of Psychology - Human Cognition or Cognitive Neuroscience University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

UC Davis is hiring! A tenure-track assistant professor of psychology, in human cognition or cognitive neuroscience #psychjobs recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07300

Kempner Research Fellowship - Kempner Institute The Kempner brings leading, early-stage postdoctoral scientists to Harvard to work on projects that advance the fundamental understanding of intelligence.

If you work on artificial or natural intelligence and are finishing your PhD, consider applying for a Kempner research fellowship at Harvard:
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

The beta release of SPM-Python is out now! Amazing work by Johan Medrano @johmedr.bsky.social , Yael Balbastre, Yulia Bezsudnova @ybezs.bsky.social and other members of their team. A new era for SPM! #OHBM2025

Job announcement 📢

@shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction!

Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions!

apply.interfolio.com/165809

A diagram showing 128 neural network architectures.

How does the structure of a neural circuit shape its function?

@neuralreckoning.bsky.social & I explore this in our new preprint:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🤖🧠🧪

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Excited to announce the first workshop on CogInterp: Interpreting Cognition in Deep Learning Models @ NeurIPS 2025! 📣

How can we interpret the algorithms and representations underlying complex behavior in deep learning models?

🌐 coginterp.github.io/neurips2025/

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Representational drift without synaptic plasticity Neural computations support stable behavior despite relying on many dynamically changing biological processes. One such process is representational drift (RD), in which neurons' responses change over ...

When neurons change, but behavior doesn’t: Excitability changes driving representational drift

New preprint of work with Christian Machens: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Poster announcing NYC RL day!

You know how RL is that whole big thing nowadays?

Present your work at the first-ever New York Reinforcement Learning Workshop (NYRL), co-organized by Amazon, Columbia Business School & NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

ny-rl.com!

Super excited to have the #InfoCog workshop this year at #CogSci2025! Join us in SF for an exciting lineup of speakers and panelists, and check out the workshop's website for more info and detailed scheduled
sites.google.com/view/infocog...

📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents.
Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656
And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!

Ireland launches global talent fund! www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob...
If you're a neuroscience professor (assistant/associate/full) and would consider relocating to the vibrant and booming city of Dublin, please get in touch!

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...

🚀Join our team @tuda.bsky.social ! 🚀
I'm looking for 3 PhDs & 1 Postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu project “C4: Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture” to study learning across individuals, teams, and cultural timescales
👉 PhD: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

Memory by a thousand rules: Automated discovery of functional multi-type plasticity rules reveals variety & degeneracy at the heart of learning Synaptic plasticity is the basis of learning and memory, but the link between synaptic changes and neural function remains elusive. Here, we used automated search algorithms to obtain thousands of str...

We just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing?

We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

Two (tenure track) Junior Professorship Chair in Nice, France on:

'Modeling in Neurosciences and Cognition'

math.univ-cotedazur.fr/laboratoire/...

'Mathematics of Life"
math.univ-cotedazur.fr/laboratoire/...

A schematic of our method. On the left are shown Bayesian inference (visualized using Bayes’ rule and a portrait of the Reverend Bayes) and neural networks (visualized as a weight matrix). Then, an arrow labeled “meta-learning” combines Bayesian inference and neural networks into a “prior-trained neural network”, described as a neural network that has the priors of a Bayesian model – visualized as the same portrait of Reverend Bayes but made out of numbers. Finally, an arrow labeled “learning” goes from the prior-trained neural network to two examples of what it can learn: formal languages (visualized with a finite-state automaton) and aspects of English syntax (visualized with a parse tree for the sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”).

🤖🧠 Paper out in Nature Communications! 🧠🤖

Bayesian models can learn rapidly. Neural networks can handle messy, naturalistic data. How can we combine these strengths?

Our answer: Use meta-learning to distill Bayesian priors into a neural network!

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

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We are hiring! Interested in computational models of social interaction and computational psychiatry?

🤔 Interested in models of social interaction and computational psychiatry?

🤗 If so, @shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are seeking a highly motivated and talented postdoc to work on these topics!

Please share widely!

apply.interfolio.com/165809

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

📢 Fantastic post doc job opportunity in my group and co-supervised by DeepMind's @mariaeckstein.bsky.social - now live! Ad here: tinyurl.com/26rafzdc - deadline May 29th.
This is part of a very exciting collaboration with @melgaby.bsky.social and Matt Nour, funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social.

Brain implant translates thoughts to speech in an instant Improvements to brain–computer interfaces are bringing the technology closer to natural conversation speed.

A brain-reading implant that translates neural signals into audible speech has allowed a woman with paralysis to hear what she intends to say nearly instantly

https://go.nature.com/3QStZtI

A prospective code for value in the serotonin system - Nature Merging ideas from reinforcement learning theory with recent insights into the filtering properties of the dorsal raphe nucleus, a unifying perspective is found explaining why serotonin neurons are ac...

I'm excited to share that the last chapter of my PhD thesis is now published in Nature! 🍾

What drives serotonin neurons? We think it's the expectation of future reward and --- critically --- how fast this expectation is increasing. 📈

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

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Developing new gene therapies for neuropsychiatric disorders Professor Gabriele Lignani, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, is leading an international team of researchers to develop a new generation of cell-state ge...

How close are we to a cure for neuropsychiatric disorders? 🤔
Thanks to funding from @aria-research.bsky.social, Prof Gabriele Lignani (@uclqsion.bsky.social) is developing cell-state gene therapies to address neuronal circuit dysfunction.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA8B...
#BrainAwarenessWeek