How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as events become familiar. Slow-timescale structure predicts memory. Excited to share this work w/ Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

Super thrilled to finally share the results of our team effort, from the lab of the one and only @ayab.bsky.social. Hopefully it will stir interesting discussions about how the brain balances continuity and segmentation

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum @erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall. Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

Our new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning

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

What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !

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...

New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Over 450 scientists have signed and the list is growing. Israeli scientists - please consider adding your name. Even if it feels like you've signed a dozen letters, we need to keep the flame of opposition alive.

Come join us at ELSC!

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

An exciting new book by Nachum Ulanovsky that calls for a more ecological approach to neuroscience across disciplines, outlining the advances that make this possible. @mitpress.bsky.social

New preprint from Yining Ding (@liliand.bsky.social)! "Temporal order memory in naturalistic events is scaffolded by semantic knowledge and hierarchical event structure" osf.io/preprints/ps...

The craziest/loveliest part of departing from @ayab.bsky.social 's lab was this jaw dropping clip they made with KlingAI and a *single* photo of me. I guess this is what you get when you mess with masters of naturalistic stimuli 😱 Such a great gift and now the rest of the world can easily extort me

So happy that our paper on event segmentation in large language models is now out in Behavior Research Methods! tinyurl.com/2j76882b With @mtoneva.bsky.social, @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, and Manoj Kumar, we show that LLMs can segment narrative text into meaningful events similarly to humans.

Congratulations Ofer!!! Haifa are lucky to have you

Human hippocampal and entorhinal neurons encode the temporal structure of experience. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I want to draw attention to a special issue that Lila Davachi and I put together to memorialize our friend and colleague Sarah DuBrow. It’s full of papers inspired by her work and her being from a group of collaborators, friends, and fans! Thanks @bradpostle.bsky.social for helping make this happen.

Very excited that this paper led by @cybellesmith.bsky.social is now out in JoCN!! We show how humans and recurrent neural nets can learn statistics unfolding at multiple timescales rapidly and concurrently. direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

Does encoding the present compete with predicting the future? Across 3 studies, we find that encoding and prediction are coupled, not competitive! Proud of co-first authors Craig Poskanzer & Hannah Tarder-Stoll, along w/ @raheemajavid.bsky.social & Edoardo Spolaore! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our paper on how blocked training supports learning of multiple schemas, with Andre Beukers, @collinsilvy.bsky.social, Ross Kempner, Nick Franklin, and @gershbrain.bsky.social, is now out in Communications Psychology! rdcu.be/dEeaG #neuroskyence #psychscisky

If you're going to be at #CNS2024 and are interested in event segmentation and serial dependence, come check out Shira Baror's poster: Monday, April 15 2:30-4:30 The project is at an early stage with very promising pilot results, so we'd love to get your feedback!

Hippocampal-cortical interactions during event boundaries support retention of complex narrative events Officially out in Neuron with @charan-neuro.bsky.social Brendan Cohn-Sheehy, Mitchell Nguyen, Reesha Yadav, and James Spargo!: authors.elsevier.com/a/1i3703BtfH...