CORE COGNITION works towards a unified theory of human cognition, instantiated in models that simulate, predict, and explain human behavior.

Animals rapidly and flexibly adapt their behavior by forming an internal cognitive map. The cognitive map has been studied at multiple levels, including normative, representational, and mechanistic ac...

It is unclear which aspects of experience shape sleep’s contributions to learning. Here, by combining neural recordings in rats with reinforcement learning, the authors show that reward-prediction sig...

Translational Psychiatry - Goal-directed behavior and hippocampal activity predict real-life impact of drinking intentions in alcohol use disorder

The role of the hippocampus in resolving memory interference has been greatly elucidated by considering the relationship between the similarity of visual stimuli (input) and corresponding similarity o...

Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...

Nature Communications - How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a...

Tübingen, Germany (July 14-16, 2025)

Humans can apply solutions used in past problems to new problems. In this study, the authors reveal the neural correlates of this process, known as generalization, and show that humans apply past poli...

“In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide…

To gain insight into complex neural data, we must move toward a data-driven regime, employing large models trained on vast amounts of data. Experts weigh in.