Blog

Imagine a world where we could visualise dreams and imagination. It might sound like something from a sci-fi story, but researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre have taken us a step closer to this futuristic reality.

A new review from Dr Athena Akrami, Group Leader at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, explores the differences and similarities between reinforcement learning and statistical learning, and future directions for research. 

Human cognitive abilities differ from those of other species, but finding clear, observable markers of the gap remains challenging. One domain where this difference becomes visible is our capacity to recognise 2D shapes. While many animals can recognise flat depictions of objects, being able to distinguish plain old squares, rectangles, and triangles seems to be an innate, and uniquely human, ability. Researchers are now investigating the neural mechanisms that make this skill possible.

A new preprint from the Akrami lab at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre shows that mice, like humans, can quickly learn patterns in sounds, including frequency and abstract rules, simply from experience, without instruction or reward. Their work demonstrates that the hippocampus performs this function of true unsupervised statistical learning, by dynamically reorganising its activity in separate subspaces, offering new insight into one of the brain’s core computational abilities.

The longer we stay awake, the stronger the homeostatic pressure to sleep becomes. But what are the precise signals of this need inside the brain, and how does that signal translate into the neural activity that drives rest? Recent studies using fruit flies, undertaken by University of Oxford researchers Dr Raffaele Sarnataro & Dr Peter S. Hasenhuetl, are providing new insights into how sleep is controlled. As two winners of the Emerging Neuroscientist Seminar Series 2025, they recently spoke at SWC about their work. In this article, they introduce their findings on how cellular energy balance and network-level oscillations can regulate sleep. 

Many of the negative effects of prolonged stress are well-known. In the brain, chronic stress reduces our ability to think. It makes solving problems, as well as regulating our behaviour, harder. But when it comes to the effects of stress on making decisions, especially choices that pit instant gratification against delayed reward, the picture is less clear. Dr Jeffrey Erlich from the SWC has published new research indicating that stress does play a role in the willingness to wait.

Researchers at the UK Dementia Research Institute, the University of Cambridge and the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre have developed and validated a fully automated novel object recognition test that runs entirely in a mouse’s home cage. By removing many sources of variability, the setup allows for more reliable measurements of memory, including long-term retention.

A new preprint from the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC) shows that the anterior lateral motor cortex (ALM), a region previously linked mainly to movement, also represents the value of competing options before converting a choice into action. The study bridges a major gap in our understanding of how abstract, value-based decisions are computed and then transformed into physical behaviour.

New research from Dr Jeffrey Erlich and Dr Jingjie Li at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre shows that the rodent brain stores short-term information in the most computationally efficient way.