Principal Investigator, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
email: jcrwhittington at gmail dot com
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Note to potential PhD applicants
If you are interested in pursuing a PhD ("DPhil") at my lab, please apply to the DPhil in Neuroscience, DPhil in Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics (focus on neuroAI), DPhil in Experimental Psychology, DPhil in Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Life Science (ILESLA) program, Fundamentals of AI CDT, Healthcare Data Science (EPSRC CDT), or a scholarship from Oxford (e.g. Clarendon) or a funding body. Deadlines are early December!
Note to current masters students / visitors who want to do a project with me
Please email me the following information: 1) CV; 2) Which MSc (or other) Program you are on; 3) Start and end date, incl. availability for ramp-up; 4) Research interest / Project proposals.
Prospective masters students
If you are interested in pursuing a Masters and want to work with me, please apply to the MSc in Neuroscience (with strong computational elements), MSc by Research in Experimental Psychology, MSc in Advanced Computer Science, MSc by Research in Engineering Science, or MSc in Clinical and Therapeutic Neuroscience.
Research Interests
Research Interests
Computational/ Theoretical neuroscience, Foundations of AI, Mechanistic Interpretability / Explainability.
News
News
I started as a Principal Investigator at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford.
I started as a Principal Investigator at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford.
Publications, Preprints
Publications, Preprints
(see google scholar for updated list)
2025
"Constructing future behaviour in the hippocampal formation through composition and replay" [paper]
JJW Bakermans, J Warren, JCR Whittington*, TEJ Behrens*
Nature Neuroscience, 2025
"Range, not Independence, Drives Modularity in Biologically Inspired Representations" [paper]
W Dorrell, K Hsu, L Hollingsworth, JH Lee, J Wu, C Finn, PE Latham, TEJ Behrens, JCR Whittington
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
2024
"A tale of two algorithms: Structured slots explain prefrontal sequence memory and are unified with hippocampal cognitive mapsA Cellular Basis for Mapping Behavioural Structure" [paper]
JCR Whittington, W Dorrell, TEJ Behrens, S Ganguli, M El-Gaby
Neuron, 2024
"A Cellular Basis for Mapping Behavioural Structure" [paper]
M El-Gaby, AL Harris, JCR Whittington, W Dorrell, A Bhomick, MW Walton, T Akam, TEJ Behrens
Nature, 2024
"The Zamba2 Suite: Technical Report" [paper]
P Glorioso, Q Anthony, Y Tokpanov, A Golubeva, V Shyam, JCR Whittington, J Pilault, B Millidge
arxiv, 2024
"Don't Cut Corners: Exact Conditions for Modularity in Biologically Inspired Representations" [paper]
W Dorrell, K Hsu, L Hollingsworth, JH Lee, J Wu, C Finn, PE Latham, TEJ Behrens, JCR Whittington
arXiv, 2024
"Zyda: A 1.3 T Dataset for Open Language Modeling"
Y Tokpanov, B Millidge, P Glorioso, J Pilault, A Ibrahim, JCR Whittington, Q Anthony
arXiv, 2024
"Zamba: A Compact 7B SSM Hybrid Model"
P Glorioso, Q Anthony, Y Tokpanov, JCR Whittington, J Pilault, A Ibrahim, B Millidge
arXiv, 2024
2023
"On prefrontal working memory and hippocampal episodic memory: Unifying memories stored in weights and activation slots" [paper]
JCR Whittington, W Dorrell, TEJ Behrens, S Ganguli, M El-Gaby
bioRxiv, 2023
"Disentanglement with Biological Constraints: A Theory of Functional Cell Types" [paper]
JCR Whittington, W Dorrell, S Ganguli, TEJ Behrens
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023. (Oral & Outstanding Paper Award honourable mention)
"Actionable Neural Representations: Grid Cells from Minimal Constraints" [paper]
W Dorrell, PE Latham, TEJ Behrens, JCR Whittington
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023
"Disentanglement via latent quantization" [paper]
K Hsu, W Dorrell, JCR Whittington, J Wu, C Finn
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023
2022
"How to build a cognitive map" [paper] [preprint] [code]
JCR Whittington, D McCaffary, JJW Bakermans, TEJ Behrens
Nature Neurosciene, 2022
"Relating transformers to models and neural representations of the hippocampal formation" [paper]
JCR Whittington, J Warren, TEJ Behrens
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022
"Reinforcement learning: Dopamine ramps with fuzzy value estimates" [paper]
JCR Whittington, TEJ Behrens
Current Biology, 2022
2021
"Constellation: Learning relational abstractions over objects for compositional imagination" [paper]
JCR Whittington, R Kabra, L Matthey, CP Burgess, A Lerchner
arXiv, 2021
2020
"The Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine: Unifying space and relational memory through generalisation in the hippocampal formation" [paper] [preprint] [code]
JCR Whittington, TH Muller, S Mark, G Chen, C Barry, N Burgess, TEJ Behrens
Cell, 2020
2019
"Theories of error back-propagation in the brain" [paper]
JCR Whittington, R Bogacz
Trends in cognitive sciences, 2019
2018
"What is a cognitive map? Organising knowledge for flexible behaviour" [paper]
TEJ Behrens, TH Muller, JCR Whittington, S Mark, AB Baram, KL Stachenfeld, Z Kurth-Nelson
Neuron, 2018
"Generalisation of structural knowledge in the hippocampal-entorhinal system" [paper] [code]
JCR Whittington, TH Muller, S Mark, C Barry, TEJ Behrens
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2018. (Oral)
"Intuitive planning: global navigation through cognitive maps based on grid-like codes" [paper]
AB Baram, TH Muller, JCR Whittington, TEJ Behrens
bioRxiv, 2018
2017
"An approximation of the error backpropagation algorithm in a predictive coding network with local hebbian synaptic plasticity" [paper, code]
JCR Whittington, R Bogacz
Neural computation, 2017
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