1/ To reduce distraction and boost focus, nothing works better than linking performance to rewards 💰 But what about focusing to avoid penalties? Turns out — it works too… just not as much as combining both! Check out our new preprint 👇 w/ Ed Vogel and @monicarosenb.bsky.social

Had a great time chatting with CASNL alum @sudkrc.bsky.social and sharing our recent work on arousal! Her editing/producing skills are next-level - she somehow wrangled my scattered brain into something that actually sounds coherent... A true miracle worker 😅

🏆 #CNS2026 Young Investigator Award Winners 🏆 Congratulations to Monica Rosenberg and Samuel D. McDougle, recipients of the 2026 Young Investigator Award! 🎉 We look forward to their award lectures at the CNS 2026 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada! 🇨🇦✨ @cogneuronews.bsky.social

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

A RNN with episodic memory, trained on free recall, learned the memory palace strategy -- the network developed an abstract item index code so that it can “walk along” the same trajectory in the hidden state space to encode/retrieve item sequences! Feedback appreciated!

Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw

New paper out! Revisiting the DMN's self-related processing from an embodied view🧠💪 Huge thanks to @choongwanwoo.bsky.social and @jeongin-lee00.bsky.social for enriching my internal model with great insights and fun discussions along the way!

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S. Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world. www.nobelprize.org

Very excited to share that my first paper, with Peter Mende-Siedlecki and @leorhackel.bsky.social, is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com! ☺️ Can getting more rewards make you feel more skilled, even if your performance doesn't change? www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨! I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.

New 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/

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out! www.momentslab.org

This is such a well crafted study with compelling findings!👏🎊

How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

👩‍💻 New preprint out (FIRST one of my PhD journey) with the incredible @lindedomingo.bsky.social @ortiztudela.bsky.social @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social "From sudden perceptual learning to enduring engrams: A representational perspective" 🧠 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

check out @hayoungsong.bsky.social's new work combining RNNs, fMRI and verbal reports to study how the brain represents and retrieves causally related memories while watching a TV episode! has been super fun to be part of this!

Key-value memory network can learn to represent event memories by their causal relations to support event cognition! Congrats to @hayoungsong.bsky.social on this exciting paper! So fun to be involved!

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬? We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do! Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

1/ 🚨 Preprint alert! How does the brain make sense of continuous experience? We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall. 👉 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233

New preprint! 🧠 Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10). doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Preprint⭐ Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We’re hiring! Pls share widely: In conjunction w/ the @bowers-wbhi.bsky.social, my team is recruiting a full-time clinical research coordinator to assist with research efforts at UC Santa Barbara. 1-2 yrs experience in MRI data collection preferred. Submit apps to: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02974

My first time presenting this line of work, linking environmental exposures, attention problems, and attention-related brain networks in the ABCD Study at the MSTP retreat! Thank you to my collaborators for your [email protected] @ariellekeller.bsky.social and others not on bluesky.

"Eureka! The brain science behind lightbulb moments" - Excellent coverage in Nature of research on the neuroscience of Aha moments, including our research on this phenomenon. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Having severe FOMO for missing #OHBM2025, but please reach out if you are interested in postdoc opportunities in our lab! Enjoy the science and sunshine!!

Incredibly excited and grateful to share that I’ll be starting a lab at The Ohio State University this(!) fall! My lab will study human learning and memory, with related interests in sleep, stress, and time perception. More info soon, but do get in touch if you’re interested in joining!

🧠📖 New paper out! How does the brain make sense of a story? Combining behavioral data, #fMRI, and #LLMs, our study explores how distinct hippocampal-cortical systems support the #encoding and #sequencing of #narrative events during ongoing comprehension. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

A Temporal Hierarchy of Sustained Attention Dynamics journals.sagepub.com/share/YUQSMC...

New preprint! Thrilled to share my latest work with @esfinn.bsky.social -- "Sensory context as a universal principle of language in humans and LLMs" osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint from the Hasson Lab🪄Delineates coupling b/w regions within the language network AND shows the elements of language that connect them. Led by @ahmadsamara.bsky.social; thanks @samnastase.bsky.social Zaid Zada & Uri Hasson. 💥 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026! I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory! RT appreciated! (1/5)

🎨🧑‍🎨 Looking for a tool to visualize subcortical/thalamic data in 2D? Check out this python-based package I put together (subcortex-visualization on PyPI), plus a guide for creating your own custom atlas meshes and vector graphics! All feedback/tips welcome 😊 anniegbryant.github.io/subcortex_vi...

Feeling fortunate that #SANS2025 was in Chicago, and so much of the lab was able to be part of the meeting! It's crazy how much the lab has grown over the past 3y10m, and I'm so proud of the work we are doing together! Happy that we could host the lab, alums (and surprise guests)! #CASNL@SANS

Excited to see this in "print"! Work led by @jinke.bsky.social decoding emotional arousal across fMRI movie datasets!

Now out in Plos Computational Biology! We identified a generalizable neural signature of emotional arousal across contexts and individuals during movie watching. work with the best team: @hayoungsong.bsky.social @Zihan Bai @monicarosenb.bsky.social @ycleong.bsky.social dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

🚨 Center for Theoretical & Computational Neuroscience @WashU invites applications from postdocs and senior graduate students to join the ⭐Computational Neuroscience Next Generation symposium (Sep 15-16 2025), travel expenses paid! ctcn.wustl.edu/2025-next-ge... Visit WashU to share your work!

Save the date! If you're going to CNS, stop by my poster on Sunday evening to get the whole story about what hippocampal timescales can tell us about memory and aging! Poster C42 #CNS2025

Check out Yining's @liliand.bsky.social tour-de-force work on temporal order memory using naturalistic events! ⭐

New ms! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I developed a normative coding theory for feedback-modulated canonical networks, providing a unified view of (1) efficient & predictive coding, (2) computational & algorithmic principles, (3) unimodal & multimodal sensory processing.

Remember what your partner said during a heated argument? Or the rush of getting your first job offer? Why do these emotionally arousing moments stick? Across 3 studies, and 3 arousal measures, we found that emotional arousal enhances memory encoding by promoting functional integration in the 🧠 1/🧵

New preprint out! 🚀 Our latest work on Motion-Corrected Eye Tracking (MoCET) is now available on bioRxiv! We introduce a method to improve gaze accuracy in fMRI experiments using head motion correction. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1101/2025... #EyeTracking #fMRI

Attention here! We found ind. diff. & fMRI evidence that sustained attention is more closely related to long term memory than to attentional control. With the best team @monicarosenb.bsky.social @edvogel.bsky.social @annacorriveau.bsky.social @jinke.bsky.social

If you are curious about the brain🧠 on causal inference, insight💡, memory retrieval, and narrative comprehension🎬, this will be the one. work by dream team @jinke.bsky.social Rhea Madhogarhia @ycleong.bsky.social @monicarosenb.bsky.social ⭐

Hi Bluesky! Happy to share my PhD work: Spatial information was consistently represented across tasks in a low-dimensional subspace of PFC activity, while task identity was encoded in an orthogonal subspace, providing a stable and independent representation of context. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Just finished a draft of my Models of Memory (grad) course that I'm teaching this spring! Please share/borrow/re-use/follow along as desired, and if you have feedback or suggestions I'd really love to hear (especially while I can still change it)! All materials are here: github.com/ContextLab/m...

We put together a really great invited program for the 1st ever SPAN meeting. WashU’s PNP program has really made this whole thing possible and I could not be more grateful to have them help bring this thing to life. There’s still time to submit, but even if you don’t, you can still come🧠❤️🥹