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 Experimental Psychology, a relevant doctoral training program, or a scholarship from Oxford (e.g. Clarendon) or a funding body. Deadlines are early December!

Note to potential masters students / visitors

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.

Research Interests

Computational/ Theoretical neuroscience, Foundations of AI, Mechanistic Interpretability / Explainability.

News

I started as a Principal Investigator at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. 

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