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Computational Neuroscience PhD student at Tel Aviv University, trying to figure out how people represent their decision environments. Also a chess international master.

At the same time, we replicated a previous finding that higher compulsivity is associated with higher outcome-irrelevant learning. This is especially interesting because autistic traits and compulsivity are positively correlated, yet show opposite associations with outcome-irrelevant learning.

Our new paper asks whether autism is linked to the way people learn from rewards. We’ve previously shown that people not only learn to value the features that predict reward, but also assign credit to features of their actions that they know are irrelevant (in this case, the card's location).

One possible explanation for this association comes from the “Communication” subscale of the autistic traits questionnaire. Lower endorsement of items such as “I find it easy to read between the lines when someone is talking to me” was linked to lower outcome-irrelevant learning.

This adds to evidence suggesting that autism involves not only disadvantages, but also a distinct cognitive style that can carry important strengths. Huge thanks to @lironrozenkrantz.bsky.social and @shaharnitzan.bsky.social for their guidance throughout this project. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A more literal cognitive style may reflect a reduced tendency to search for hidden structure where none exists, leading to a more optimal behavior in these contexts.

Here, we found that individuals with autism showed greater resistance to bias driven by outcome-irrelevant information. Across the full sample, higher autistic traits were associated with decreased learning of outcome-irrelevant information.

How does the brain decide which mental strategy to use when inferring others' beliefs? Excited to (finally!) see my first first-author paper out @natneuro.nature.com Summary below 🧵 #CogSci #CogNeuro www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint (by Vandendriessche et al.) In everyday life, choices often lead to multiple simultaneous outcomes — some positive, some negative. Yet most reinforcement learning research has focused on situations where each choice produces only a single outcome 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...

I wrote up something that's been in my head for a while: psychometric methods alone can't tell us what cognitive tasks and their indicators measure. Correlating indicators across tasks is circular when constructs are defined by those same correlations. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵1/3

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)