🌟 Excited to share that I'm recruiting PhD students in Psychology for my new lab at Rice University this cycle (Signal boost appreciated!) To learn more, check out the Learning & Behavior Change Lab website: www.sinclairlab-rice.com Applications are due Dec 1st: psychology.rice.edu/graduate/pro...

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...

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 &👇

Next up, from @atabk.bsky.social and @wouterkool.bsky.social: Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure. In sum, Ata stuck hidden (and shifting) rules into a word list learning task, creating "events" that influenced the structure of recall. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I'm a behind on shouting out new papers! From Angelique Delarazan: Narrative Coherence Warps the Timeline of Recalled Naturalistic Events. In sum, when recalling stories, people systematically deviate from temporal organization to follow the narrative threads. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

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

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!

New preprint from Yining Ding @liliand.bsky.social! People use semantic event knowledge and grouping to remember the temporal order of events. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Is the hippocampus best understood in term of discrete subfields or functional gradients? Functional gradients are recapitulated within each hippocampal subfield, supporting a role for both discrete & continuously changing computations. Neat work by Bouffard, @barense.bsky.social, & Moscovitch!

Discrete Subfields and Continuous Gradients Coexist: A Multi-Scale View of Hippocampal Organization https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.19.671141v1

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...

Proud to share the first preprint of my PhD w/ @barense.bsky.social & Mursal Jahed: “Putting the testing effect to the test in the wild: Retrieval enhances real-world memories and promotes their semantic integration while preserving episodic integrity” See thread! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com: Cuts to NIH funding will impact the economy and employment nationwide. We visualize these losses and advocate for a theory-driven approach to communicating local, self-relevant impact. w/ @joshuasweitz.bsky.social + SCIMaP team: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pandemic project ready to share! Short movies (many of which are emotional) you can use as stimuli: rdcu.be/ekNMo Stimuli, data, and code: osf.io/hk32g/?view_... #psynomBRM

This study examines how events structured recall, which was impaired for items after event boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showed that decision certainty predicts recall success. @atabk.bsky.social @wouterkool.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A collection of modules, datasets, and other resources for learning to program in R, geared toward students in psychology and neuroscience: ritcheym.github.io/ppn/

Hi friends, the Spark Society's NSF funding has been terminated. We are dedicated to continuing our work and hope we can rely on you for support.

Excited that we are recruiting for a new postdoctoral program in Cognitive, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience at #WashU! Get in touch if you have questions! sites.wustl.edu/systemsneuro...

New preprint 🎉: How do episodic memory, emotions, and schemas for caregiver experiences come together in kids’ brains and verbal recall? Check out our new results showing how past and present childhood experiences shape perception and memory for movies: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

ICYMI: Here is a great summary of our @commspsychol.bsky.social paper examining the link between curiosity, spatial exploration, and memory via virtual environments. with @cjhodgetts.bsky.social @danlucen.bsky.social www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/29... Paper link 👉🏻: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This is so not okay.

Excited to share our new preprint! Using a narrative reading paradigm, we showed that temporal order memory reconstruction can depend on multiple sources of information - factors like knowledge about typical event order and hierarchical event structure can both play important roles! 📖🧠

#CNS2025 If you are curious about how hippocampal subfields distinctively support the learning of surprising exceptions to category knowledge, come check out my poster at Session C tomorrow between 5 and 7 pm!

Also, I’m doing a talk 3/30 1:30pm in Symposium 1: Creating the structure of ongoing experience, chaired by the one and only @jameswardantony.bsky.social. Also featuring talks by Janice Chen and New Investigator Awardee @esfinn.bsky.social. Hope to see some of you there!

Hey friends! Come say hi to folks from my lab and from @jzacks.bsky.social lab at #CNS2025. We have a bunch of in-progress stuff this time, including a “sketchpad series” by @raynatang.bsky.social. Also, Veronica and June (with @alexbarnett.bsky.social) were undergrads when they did their projects 🙂

If you're at #CNS2025 come check out our lab's Sunday line-up of posters from @catalinayang.bsky.social, @bryanhong.bsky.social, @nellymatorina.bsky.social, and @laurenhomann.bsky.social.

📣 Across the U.S., cuts to federal funding for health research are projected to cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs. How will YOUR area be impacted? Excited to share SCIMaP, a website that our team has created to communicate the impact of funding cuts. #PsychSciSky #MedicalSky scienceimpacts.org

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

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...

My grants were terminated.

What the US is doing now is shocking.

The modified announcements say that up to 15% of doctoral, and 20% of postdoctoral, awards can be held by international scholars.

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 ⭐

Thrilled to see our study -- @diamondn.bsky.social @brianlevine.bsky.social and many others -- published in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social We find that sleep enhances memory for the order of events from an art tour, but not the details of the events; and this advantage persisted for over a year! 😴

@diamondn.bsky.social et al. find that sleep enhances memory for the order of events from an art tour, but not the details of the events. The sleep-related advantage for sequences persists for over a year. @brianlevine.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 New lab paper!🚨 A dream study of mine for nearly 20 yrs not possible until now thanks to NIH 🧠 funding & 1st-author lead @seeber.bsky.social We tracked hippocampal activity as people walked memory-guided paths & imagined them again. Did brain patterns reappear?🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NEW: The NIH has begun terminating grants for active projects studying gender identity, DEI, environmental justice, climate change, among other topics. At least 16 termination letters have already been sent — and hundreds more are coming, people inside NIH tell me. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE SPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT! ☀️ Bill Nye will be speaking at Stand Up for Science in D.C. on March 7th! More speaker announcements coming soon, stay tuned! 👀☀️

We recently published a new paper investigating APOE effects in Cam-CAN @camcan-2010.bsky.social movie dataset. Examining various measures we failed to find any APOE effects in healthy individuals. You can read more about it in the paper doi.org/10.1177/2398... or the thread below

New Preprint 🚨 This research with @bjherrmann.bsky.social, @alexbarnett.bsky.social, and @barense.bsky.social extends previous work exploring how LLMs can simulate human event segmentation, with applications for automated recall assessments. arxiv.org/abs/2502.13349

If you live in AK, AL, IN, FL, KS, KY, LA, ME, MO, OH, and SC, your reps are on the Senate HELP Committee which has jurisdiction over NIH. Write to them pointing out the jobs and money coming to your state from NIH: www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-... describe impact of NIH cuts on....

WOMEN and FEMALE are red flag words. (Men, male are not on the list). Let that sink in.

This is putting people’s lives at risk. More than at risk. Write to your representatives. Show up at protests. Donate your time or your money. This is not the time to sit on the sidelines.

I am probably preaching to the choir but please spread the word-massive NIH reforms could effectively kill US biomedical research and most medical and nursing schools. Alzheimer's Cancer Flu etc. don't care about who you voted for. We need to get the word out. www.npr.org/sections/sho...