Theo Schäfer

Excited to be in New York for #CCN2026! I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow at 10:30 AM about neural belief state dynamics and presenting my poster on August 5 at 9:30 AM. Looking forward to see you! 2026.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=8...

We're finally getting the tools to study replay in humans. But why bother? What can we learn from it that we don't know from rodent recordings? Our thoughts are now out in a new TICS Forum Great fun writing this w @smfleming.bsky.social + @maritpetzka.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

How fast agentic AI has changed our work is head-spinning and there's been a lot of debate in our lab. So we drafted guidelines to help navigate this new reality. Sharing here in the hope it’s useful for others & curious to hear thoughts schucklab.gitlab.io/ai-policy.html #AcademicSky #compneurosky

New preprint! How do threat beliefs drive avoidance & what happens when avoidance prevents us from verifying them? New work showing a bidirectional link between beliefs and avoidance! Lucky to work w @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social @tobywise.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

The prefrontal cortex controls memory organization in the hippocampus www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

We’re very happy to share that our work on 3D spatial memory was published in PNAS just before the end of the year! 🎉 Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/8)

Is cognition a universal feature of the living world? How can we define it? Is a nervous system needed? If so, why? If not, why not? Check this fascinating @royalsocietypublishing.org Theme Issue led by @drmichaellevin.bsky.social & co. on Basal Cognition royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Check out our new preprint on how environmental deformation and locomotion affect 3D maps! Co-led with @reisnerv.bsky.social, alongside Leonard König, Misun Kim, and Christian Doeller. Very proud of this work!

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

It’s a Preprint! 👋 We show how we can dissociate perceptual from value-based mechanisms of generalisation + that stronger gen. in anxiety is associated with value rather than perception. w/ @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social @bernhardspitzer.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/n

SEEING THROUGH YOUR EYES 👁️: Excited to share our new paper (which is out now @nature.com !!) with Wenbo Tang, Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz✉️, and Azahara Oliva✉️: we discovered a novel sleep microstructure that promotes memory replay! #Neuroscience #hippocampus nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵 1/12👇

A detailed new look at dopamine signaling suggests neuroscientists’ model of reinforcement learning may need to be revised. #MIT "Dopamine release plateau and outcome signals in dorsal striatum contrast with classic reinforcement learning formulations" #NatureCom www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our work on inductive biases in reinforcement learning is out: tinyurl.com/yfc74e3u By the fantastic @noahedrich.bsky.social Ppl learn faster from slowly changing features; we argue this reflects an inductive bias. Teamwork w @ericschulz.bsky.social & S HallMcMaster #neuroskyence #compneuro

Happy to share our review on OFC/vmPFC representations in Trends in Neurosciences, written with @nirmoneta.bsky.social and Shany Grossman www.cell.com/trends/neuro... Very short thread below to summarize our review #neuroscience #neuroskyence #compneurosky #PsychSciSky

One of my PhD projects is online! We show that category prototypes correspond to interpolated states in a cognitive map that guide cortical pattern completion during category-based decisions. w/ Mirko Thalmann, Eric Schulz, Christian Doeller, Stephanie Theves www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...