Jakob Voigts investigates how the brain’s neocortex represents and sequentially updates hypotheses using the spatial computations that occur as rodents undertake natural behaviors. When mice behave naturally in complex environments, they maintain a working memory, use this memory to interpret ambiguous cues, and plan ahead on timescales from seconds to hours. Voigts and his team seek to use the computations that are inherent to these behaviors to probe the underlying neural mechanisms. They approach this by identifying and quantifying the computations performed by animals during complex ethological behaviors and use these computations to gain insights into their neural implementation.