New paper! Multistep inference across the human lifespan can be improved with individualized memory interventions, with co-first @kwcooper.bsky.social @lovecrabmeat.bsky.social @dalezhou.bsky.social, Craig Stark, and @aaronbornstein.bsky.social (🧵): academic.oup.com/psychsocgero...

I am thrilled to share that I will be joining the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at CU Boulder in January 2027, where I'll be starting the Affective Learning and Translational Memory (AltMem) Lab. I am also recruiting PhD students in the upcoming cycle (starting fall 2027)! altmemlab.org

Thrilled to have this preprint out, from the amazing Zekun Sun! "Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns" In brief, across 8 experiments we found evidence of a causal role for abstract representations in motor learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Can you make your life feel “longer” in retrospect? Add a dose of change and novelty in the present to later expand memories of your past. Excited to share our work on how dopamine-related processing bends memory to reflect the passage of distinct events. newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/can...

🚨🚨JOB ALERT🚨🚨 I'm hiring a cogsci/philosophy/compneuro postdoc at @ucl.ac.uk @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @uclpals.bsky.social! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRH486/p... Come to London & work on frameworks for "testing" for consciousness using Bayesian belief updating & latent variable modeling. Pls share!

🚨🚨 The Social Learning and Decisions Lab is hiring! 🚨🚨 We're looking for a postbacc project coordinator/research assistant to join our team this summer. More details about the position and how to apply here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ySeA... Please share widely and reach out with any questions!

Neuromatch has been denied our Office of Foreign Assets Control "Iran license" renewal. We had renewed successfully before, but now our request is “inconsistent with current U.S. foreign policy.” I am absolutely gutted by this denial.

I'll be recruiting PhD students (2027 entry) and a postdoc to join the lab at Berkeley. Interests: • continuous person perception in interactive contexts • impression management and its biases • social perception in digital spaces Get in touch if there's overlap. Very excited for this next chapter!

📢Become an AI Sentience scholar. Apply by Tues April 28! @neddo.bsky.social & I are looking for a grad student/postdoc w expertise in survey studies/modeling & topic - 6 months part-time online collab - 8hrs/week June-Dec 2026 - Up to $5k stipend, $3k project costs neuromatch.io/ai-sentience... 1/n

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

New preprint! Prefrontal brain-to-brain synchrony during human group hunting: Evidence from fNIRS hyperscanning Heroic work from @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social and team fNIRS & minecraft combined to reveal PFC synchrony during human group hunting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint! 🧠 How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli? By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis "From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We’ve got an exciting new thing to share! We have causal evidence (using TMR) that memory reactivation during sleep promotes abstract understanding of underlying structure, allowing transfer learning in a new domain with zero superficial feature overlap with the learned one.

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

Academic friends, It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region. A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions. Please read & sign if you agree: sites.google.com/view/protect... #IranWar

Happy to share some of the work done in our lab in this mega-thread of nine (!) papers/preprints (+1 sneak peek) from the last six months. Here goes (in no particular order)! **Please repost** and let me know if you need access to any of the PDFs! #sleeppeeps #sleep #neuroscience 1/12

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!

New paper! Out now in Neuropsychologia: “Sparsity and memory constraints interact with training sequence to bias learning of associative maps” with @dalezhou.bsky.social*, @kwcooper.bsky.social, @lovecrabmeat.bsky.social, and @aaronbornstein.bsky.social. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mipv6TBG9... 🧵:

🚨NEW PREPRINT (w/ Fleming Peck & Hongjing Lu) "Spontaneous emergence of context-dependent statistical learning in humans and neural networks" We are constantly predicting what will happen next. Yet the same cue can lead to different predictions depending on context. How might this work...? 🧵1/8

out today, enjoyed writing this w/ @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social !

New lab paper! We built a new computational model that explains several disparate observations about the conditions that promote (or hinder) associative learning. Main finding is that different kinds of experience (blocked, interleaved) have opposing effect at high vs low memory capacity. 🧵 below!

New review from our group out in Nature Reviews Psychology: Determinants of individual navigation ability with my excellent co-author: @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social

Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7

Proud to share the lab’s first preprint, led by the fantastic @christinamaher.bsky.social! 🎉 Real-world environments are high-dimensional and noisy. Selective attention is thought to shape the state representations that make reinforcement learning tractable.

This position is still open! Come join us!

How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories? We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate! Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!

Where you look next isn’t arbitrary. In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊 Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules. Led by Dammy Onih! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We review studies showing that when brain areas face similar computational demands in social and non-social context, they perform the same computations. We argue that exaptation (repurposing of traits for new functions) played a key role in brain evolution.

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:

New preprint from Lindsey Tepfer (@ltjaql.bsky.social) and me! We silenced portions of internal monologues in two films to manipulate participants' access to characters' thoughts. Using ISC and RSA, we found that this aligned later neural processing of the narrative & encoding of trait impressions.

So proud of @meganspurney.bsky.social and team for this exciting new paper from my lab! Younger adolescents' working memory performance benefits more from reward than older teens and young adults. This occurs even though all ages report similar preferences about reward value and cognitive demand.

Very proud that this is finally out! Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..

Excited to announce that my last project from grad school is finally out in JoCN! Accepted last fall, but if you’re a fan of formatted PDFs now is your time to strike. Neural Reinstatement of Encoding Context Mediates the Switch between Fear and Extinction Recall direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

We are hiring a research specialist, to start this summer! This position would be a great fit for individuals looking to get more experience in computational and cognitive neuroscience research before applying to graduate school. #neurojobs Apply here: research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21503/r...

Final paper of my PhD 🤗 www.nature.com/articles/s44... There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making. However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.

❗New Paper❗Is children's attention more like a spotlight that darts across time, or one that diffuses across many things at once? How might children's immature attention help their learning? Our Dev Sci Paper has answers! 🧵🎯 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41549519/

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter. How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need? Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

How do we achieve few-shot generalization? New work led by @fabianrenz.bsky.social dives into the role of replay in learning and using structure to generalize reward. Dream team effort with Shany Grossman @nathanieldaw.bsky.social Peter Dayan & @doellerlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New report from doctors shows the Iranian regime slaughtered 16,500 protesters during the communications shutdown.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931

Recently posted: A video of this talk, intended to trigger conversations. Please consider watching as a group, followed by a discussion of next steps for psychiatry-related research with your community. Discussions like these are crucial for progress. mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/Nicole...

📣 Our lab is hiring a full-time RA/lab manager! Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara to study the neural bases of affect-cognition interactions using fMRI and brain stimulation. Great stepping stone to a PhD in cognitive/affective neuro 🧠🐬🏖️ Apply by Jan 22: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03048

🧠 Hiring a Research Assistant/Lab Manager! Share widely! 📍 St. Louis | ⏰ Full-time We're launching the How We Learn Lab @WashU, studying attention, learning & memory interactions. Perfect for anyone interested in dev cog neuro who wants hands-on experience before grad school. deckerlab.com

Excited to be teaching a new undergraduate course on Models of Language and Conversation this term! Check it out here: context-lab.com/llm-course/ I've added lots of fun interactive demos of chatbots and NLP techniques that let students dig into the approaches.

Agency reorganizes memory around relevant decisions. This was collaboration the deeply missed Sarah DuBrow and steer-headed by our grad students @lindsayrait.bsky.social and Elizabeth Horwath. p.s. the task design involves curating gift baskets. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41436249/

Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.

What if we could tell you how well you’ll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? ☕️ In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 can be measured with neuroimaging – and 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸.

What has my research lab been up to in 2025? Time for a wrap up of our research! This image is a gathering of key figures from our 2025 publications: Links to publications in the replies: #spierslab #research #neuroskyence

Had a great time talking to Maggie Penman about new research on lifespan brain development led by @alexamousley.bsky.social in @duncanastle.bsky.social's group. This is a great summary of the study and a broader discussion of what brain research can teach us about important developmental phases.