Constructing novel states from experience underpins imagination and abstraction. The hippocampal formation is thought to contribute by capturing the relational structure of experiences, but it remains unclear how its abstract relational codes are eventually translated into cortical content representations. I highlight that hippocampal–cortical indexing may scaffold the generation of new states.

What does it mean for something to be complex? Fundamentally, complexity is a cue that something is less easily represented by our minds. With this fact in view, complexity becomes a tool: By understa...

The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.

Dhanerawala et al. show that hippocampal reward cells are functionally segregated from the place cell spatial map. Temporally precise VIP+ interneuron activity bidirectionally controls reward cell num...

Cognitive maps are essential for navigation, but to what extent are they involved in thinking more broadly? In this opinion article, we examine whether cognitive maps constitute a genuine vehicle for ...

Compositionality exists on a continuum of increasing complexity rather than as a binary trait. Studying its implementation in simpler biological and artificial systems is the most tractable path towar...

ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.

Website for the Bayesian Workflow book by Gelman, Vehtari, McElreath, et al. — case studies, code, and exercises in R and Stan.

Abstract. Recent behavioral and neural research on reading shows that humans can extract syntactic structure from short sentences within a fraction of a second—faster than many estimates for recognizi...

To solve diverse real-world tasks, the brain must flexibly switch between task rules and adjust computations. Recent advances in analyzing neural data and modeling neural networks have revealed their ...

In Principles of Neural Design (2015, MIT Press), inspired by Charles Darwin, Sterling and Laughlin undertook the unfashionable task of distilling principles from facts in the technique-driven, data-s...

In the hippocampus, complex processing of sensory stimuli occurs even in the unconscious state.

Sentences in natural language have a hierarchical structure that can be described in terms of nested trees. To compose sentence meaning, the human bra…

A new analysis commissioned by The New York Times suggests that Google's AI Overviews are wrong an astonishing percentage of the time.

Biolinguistics is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the biological foundations, evolution, and genetic basis of human language. It treats language as an innate biological organ or faculty of t...

Appeals to representation are widespread, despite neuroscientists’ uncertainty about what kind of findings count as evidence for such claims. In this Perspective, Pohl and colleagues develop a unified...