Catrina Hacker
Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and sci-comm enthusiast interested in brains 🧠 and models of them 💻.
Website: catrinahacker.com
- Reposted by Catrina HackerSensory adaptation supports flexible evidence accumulation during perceptual decision making biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
- Reposted by Catrina HackerImagine wearing a #jellyfish as a helmet!?! Well, that’s exactly what this juvenile jack is doing! Mostly immune to its sting, the jack has taken the jellyfish prisoner. Shot using #scuba, out over the deep abyss, drifting at night. #blackwater #blackwaterdiving #scubadiving #gug
- Reposted by Catrina HackerYou might think mind control is science fiction, but for some fungi it’s just what they do. Explore the fascinating world of parasitic fungi and how they control infected insects in this week's post by @catrinahacker.bsky.social: pennneuroknow.com/2026/01/27/w... #PsychSciSky #SciComm 🧠🟦 🧪
- Reposted by Catrina HackerOur new paper (with @biotay.bsky.social) is out and on the cover story of @currentbiology.bsky.social !!!! Veronika, a Carinthian mountain cow flexibly uses a “multi-purpose tool” to scratch herself. A video and more information will follow in the comments. www.cell.com/current-biol...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerWriting is thinking Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.
- Reposted by Catrina HackerPuzzling red spots in photos from the James Webb Space Telescope are probably young supermassive black holes obscured by dense cocoons of gas
- Reposted by Catrina HackerReally thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931
- Reposted by Catrina Hackersuper excited to share my preprint with @meganakpeters.bsky.social stimulus familiarity shapes hierarchical structure learning and metacognitive dynamics🚀😊!! osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Excited to share our NEWEST PREPRINT led by @rochellekaper.bsky.social!! osf.io/preprints/ps... We ask: How do people learn multiple layers of environmental structure – w/o feedback – & how well do they *know* they’ve learned? Turns out, stimulus familiarity matters more than we thought! 🧵👇
- Reposted by Catrina Hacker
Now on @sciam.bsky.social: A new study uses tools from string theory to improve models of branching neurons, blood vessels, and more. But was string theory's arcane math actually needed for the job? www.scientificamerican.com/article/does... - Reposted by Catrina HackerFinally out! We studied the retinas of the longest-living vertebrate, the Greenland shark, and found that the retinas remain remarkably healthy in animals around 150 years old. What is the mechanism? It may be a highly efficient DNA repair system. Enjoy! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerSea anemones and jellyfish don’t have brains, but the way their neurons behave during sleep shows some surprising similarities to humans
- Reposted by Catrina HackerHappy to see the final version of our article out! Brain–computer interfaces as a causal probe for scientific inquiry: Trends in Cognitive Sciences doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.06.017
- Reposted by Catrina HackerOur new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social shows different neural systems for integrating views into places--PPA integrates views *of* a location (e.g., views of a landmark), while RSC integrates views *from* a location (e.g., views of a panorama). Work by the bluesky-less Linfeng Tony Han.
- #JNeurosci: Using fMRI, Han and Epstein explored how people integrate different kinds of views to form mental maps of places, revealing two sets of brain regions involved in integrating views of landmarks into existing mental maps of a virtual city. doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0…
- 🚨 New preprint! Why do some insights from spikes translate to field potentials while others don't? In this paper we compare visual memory representations in spikes and LFPs to propose a general framework that answers this question. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵 (1/10) 🧠🟦 🧠💻
- We leveraged datasets where we've previously reported on the spiking neural representations that support visual memory to ask a simple question: would we have made the same conclusions if we’d been limited to LFPs (similar to many human intracranial experiments)? (2/10)
- Others have suggested that high-gamma activity (HGA) captures a proxy of underlying spiking activity. We found that was true of our datasets as well, where HGA consistently captured spiking activity better than other frequency bands. (3/10)
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View full threadThis work wouldn’t have been possible without the support, expertise, and patience of @nicolecrust.bsky.social and @brettlfoster.bsky.social, the generosity and helpfulness of @simonbohn.bsky.social, and the support of countless others. (10/10)
- Reposted by Catrina HackerNew Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A
- Reposted by Catrina HackerAmid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerFrom glowing neurons to newborn memories, here are the most fascinating brain discoveries of 2025
- Reposted by Catrina HackerBichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467
- Reposted by Catrina Hacker“Basic neuroscience hasn’t produced new drugs.” 💊 Not true - zuranolone (PPD), suzetrigine (pain), gepants (migraine), and more... were born out of a long arc of studies in the lab. I wrote a Perspective on why this matters. @thetransmitter.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/drug-develop...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerLast week, we published the surprising result below (visual cortex == hippocampus). Today, we've posted a revised preprint showing something that's actually different between the two structures. Evidence for a novel medial temporal lobe computation! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Excited to share a new article, led by Barnes Jannuzi. Here we tried to pinpoint something about visual familiarity that isn't reflected in visual cortex via something putatively hippocampal. Nope! Per the theme of this era, the brain is not so simple. /1 www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
- Excited to see this work led by Barnes Jannuzi published! With a hard-won dataset, Barnes shares the surprising result that visual cortex looks more like the hippocampus than you might think! #neuroskyence
- Excited to share a new article, led by Barnes Jannuzi. Here we tried to pinpoint something about visual familiarity that isn't reflected in visual cortex via something putatively hippocampal. Nope! Per the theme of this era, the brain is not so simple. /1 www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
- Reposted by Catrina Hacker“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”
- Reposted by Catrina HackerI'm so grateful to be recognized as one of The Transmitter's Rising Stars of Neuroscience. Thank you, @thetransmitter.bsky.social! Learn about the amazing scientific, mentoring, and community-building contributions made by friends selected around the world 🧠🌍 www.thetransmitter.org/early-career...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerFriends at #SFN25: Want to know more about how seeing is transformed into familiarity? Check out Simon Bohn's poster this afternoon (Board P9; PSTR224.03). There, he'll tell you about a pardox and its resolution - along with a previously undescribed computation in the medial temporal lobe.
- Reposted by Catrina HackerAdditional plug for my talk, at 8:45am, examining the relationship between arousal state and hippocampal ripples in both sleep and wake states! In close collaboration with @yvonnechen.bsky.social 👁️😴🧠 #SfN
- Please join me and @lizsiefert.bsky.social at 8a tomorrow for a great lineup of speakers focused on bridging the gap between animal and human memory neuroscience! #neuroskyence #SFN2025
- "Basic translational neuroscience" is how @catrinahacker.bsky.social describes work focused on filling in the missing foundational info required for translational impact. Don't miss this terrific #SFN2025 nanosymposium that she & @lizsiefert.bsky.social have organized around that idea! (Sun, 8a).
- Reposted by Catrina HackerThere’s a lot of talk about vaccines and autism, but what does the science say? This week @pennngg.bsky.social student Nita Rome unpacks the history behind these concerns and how modern studies have debunked this misconception. pennneuroknow.com/2025/11/11/v... #PsychSciSky #SciComm 🧠🟦🧪
- Reposted by Catrina HackerResearch in primate brains has been essential for the development of brain-computer interfaces and artificial neural networks. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk, write Cory Miller, @movshon.bsky.social and Doris Tsao. #neuroskyence bit.ly/47MXYLH
- Reposted by Catrina HackerFunders must recognise that great discoveries often come from studies that seeks to advance knowledge for its own sake go.nature.com/47zrzYZ
- Reposted by Catrina HackerWith all the fuss over tylenol, we're missing a bigger issue: we don't know enough about medication safety in pregnancy because so few drug studies include pregnant people. And that harms both women and their fetuses. My latest @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerNew preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/
- Reposted by Catrina HackerPythagorean Triple Square Day, as one man affectionately calls 9/16/25, is a day like no other this century.
- Reposted by Catrina HackerThe @intlbrainlab.bsky.social published 2 papers today on their work to create a map of neural activity across the entire mouse brain. Learn more about the lab: simonsfoundation.org/2025/02/20/how-do-o…
- Reposted by Catrina Hacker15 years of radio observations yielded this amazing view down the throat of a black hole. We're looking into a jet of plasma shooting out from a supermassive black hole, called PKS 1424+240. The lines depict intense magnetic fields threaded through the jet. 🧪🔭 www.mpg.de/25171297/eye...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerOne of the joys of being a scientist is the ability to think about a problem for a long time. Our new preprint solves a mystery that has been bugging me since I was a graduate student (which was, ahem, a while ago). 🧪🧠🧵1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- At #ccn2025 and interested in bridging animal and human neuroscience? Stop by B121 this afternoon to see our investigation of the neural representations in spikes and field potentials and our surprising result that sometimes field potentials are better! 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=t... 🧠📈
- Work done in collaboration with Brett Foster and @nicolecrust.bsky.social
- Reposted by Catrina HackerWhether it’s on paper, screen or audio, there are more ways than ever to enjoy a good book. But do different formats engage the brain in the same way? Co-editor @catrinahacker.bsky.social explores in this week's post: pennneuroknow.com/2025/08/05/t... #PsychSciSky #SciComm 🧠🟦 🧪 📖
- Reposted by Catrina HackerAs has been clear since April*, Vought intends a pocket rescission. This blanket hold is another tactic to maximize the size of that rescission. Rescission is THEFT from the public. We have until Aug 15 to spend out the budget. CAL CONGRESS AND DEMAND THE HOLD BE LIFTED. Lives are on the line 🧪 *
- Reposted by Catrina Hacker⚡ New preprint ⚡ Long ago, I heard a talk about our remarkable ability to remember 1000s of images, after seeing each only once. How do brains manage it? 🤔 After years, this reflects the answer I was looking for. Congrats to Simon Bohn et al. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... More: /1
- Reposted by Catrina HackerMy latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum
- Reposted by Catrina HackerI am excited to announce (belatedly) that my dissertation’s final chapter has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience! doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerThe octopus brain has teased researchers since the 1960s, but recording from it seemed impossible. Cris Niell and his team’s calcium imaging experiments finally “showed that this brain could be studied,” says Sam Reiter. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/vision/cepha...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerNew preprint! Statistical structure skews object memory toward predictable successors. Model simulations show how this bias can arise from the backward expansion of hippocampal representations. w/co-first @codydong.bsky.social , @marlietandoc.bsky.social & @annaschapiro.bsky.social osf.io/yuxb6_v1
- Reposted by Catrina HackerThey would've found something to weaponize regardless. One of the most admirable things about science is its commitment to self-criticism. The fact that bad actors may capitalize on our legitimate concerns should never stop us from being honest and reflective about what we do.
- Reposted by Catrina Hacker[This post could not be retrieved]
- Thank you @joulesriley.bsky.social for covering such an important topic! Curiosity-driven research is essential, even when we're not certain exactly what application it might have down the line. The two examples Jules highlights show how investing in basic research now has huge payout later.
- There's no doubt about it, curiosity-driven research is important. This week, @joulesriley.bsky.social shares how years of curiosity-driven research led to two of the biggest clinical breakthroughs of the modern era: pennneuroknow.com/2025/05/20/b... #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #SciComm 🧪
- Reposted by Catrina HackerThis highlights the point that comparisons between humans and machines are continually muddied by a lack of distinction between evolution and development, both of which contribute to learning in the broad sense.
- Reposted by Catrina HackerSharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation. rdcu.be/el18q A short thread follows for those interested. 1/n
- Reposted by Catrina Hacker(1/6) Thrilled to share our triple-N dataset (Non-human Primate Neural Responses to Natural Scenes)! It captures thousands of high-level visual neuron responses in macaques to natural scenes using #Neuropixels.
- Triple-N Dataset: Non-human Primate Neural Responses to Natural Scenes biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- Reposted by Catrina HackerIn a new special series called “Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI,” @quantamagazine.bsky.social looks far beyond AI-based research tools to explore how #AI is changing what it means to do #science and what it means to be a scientist. www.quantamagazine.org/series/scien...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerNew work by @liushuze.bsky.social establishes an empirical link between policy complexity and neural dimensionality: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerWhy does the forebrain expand dramatically while other neural regions grow less? Our new publication reveals progenitor metabolism critically shapes region-specific brain growth. Thread below. authors.elsevier.com/a/1k-udL7PXu...
- Reposted by Catrina HackerOur latest manuscript (7 years in the works) tackles the question of how diurnal ground squirrels evolved a cone-dominant retina, in contrast to the ancestral rod-dominant retina retained by virtually all other mammals./1 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Catrina Hacker🧠✨How do we rebuild our memories? In our new study, we show that hippocampal ripples kickstart a coordinated expansion of cortical activity that helps reconstruct past experiences. We recorded iEEG from patients during memory retrieval... and found something really cool 👇(thread)
- Reposted by Catrina HackerA putative neural correlate of mood! One big (scandalous?) idea, simple analyses, and the STRONGEST brain/behavior correlation I've EVER seen (which is shocking, given that it's mood). Work with: You-Ping Yang, @catrinahacker.bsky.social and Veit Stuphorn. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
