🧠👀 'These findings reveal high-dimensional aspects of cortical representation undetectable with conventional methods, such as RSA, & contradict previous theories suggesting that high-level visual cortex representations are low-dimensional.' #neuroskyence journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

New paper out in @jexpsocpsych.bsky.social ! We (@kwinter.bsky.social, @kaiepstude.bsky.social , Bob Fennis and I) found that encouraging counterfactual thinking reduces engagement with conspiracy theories (i.e., clicks on, and reading times for, conspiracy articles). A 🧵 1/n

Aligning eye tracking and free recall time series, we found that increased saccades predict episodic (vs. non-episodic) by 0.5 s. Just out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, led by Ryan Barker with the inimitable @drjenryan.bsky.social. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Check out the interview I did on the Many Minds Podcast - we chat about all things memory: manyminds.libsyn.com/what-is-memo...

New pontification piece with @awestbrook.bsky.social and Jean Daunizeau, just out in TICS: Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly? (or why does it hurt to think) never written a review paper before in my life, that was a new and unusual experience

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience From the amazing @lauragrima.bsky.social and colleagues - definitely looking forward to reading this! #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition

(1/4) 🧠 Did you know that kids remember time differently than adults? Our new preprint review w/ @drjeni-mdlab.bsky.social discusses the real implications for juvenile justice & why we need to ask about timing in ways that match kids' developing brains ⚖️ Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms — a Perspective by György Buzsáki #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper from our lab by Ricardo Morales-Torres (@rmt93.bsky.social) on the visual and semantic properties that shape the vividness of mental representations for events past. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... The short answer to the title, "What Makes Memories Vivid?" is ... meaning!

Now that we have Hidden Markov Models do we still need correlation matrices?? 😀 For example, this looks cool. (I'm aware that HMMs are not new, I played with them in grad school...) doi.org/10.1016/j.is... #neuroskyence

What is the representation underlying cognition? Formal models rely on multidimensional scaling of similarity judgments to derive the representation. In this preprint with @mdlbayes.bsky.social, we take an alternative approach; we build Bayesian generative models for three cognitive tasks. /1

I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting. A neural state space for episodic memories www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪

Sometimes it can be a pain choosing the route, and toughest when two paths seem equivalent. Nice new article from Liz Crastil's lab explores what factors drive choices of route: Graph Properties Drive Navigational Selection between Equidistant Routes www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How can the "default network" support many forms of introspective thought? Our new review argues these functions rely on distinct MTL connections: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thanks to @denizvatansever.bsky.social & Jess Andrews-Hanna for the invitation to this Special Issue! 🧵

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

🚨 New preprint alert! We use trained-from-scratch GPT-2 models to characterize & capture the unique writing styles of individual authors. We also develop a new LLM-based relative stylometric measure. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.21958 Code/data: github.com/ContextLab/l... 🤗: huggingface.co/contextlab

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!

Vivid memories are all over the BBC website front page! It takes just a few minutes to complete our public survey: cambridge.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Great thread. Science is a specific window into our world. It has affordances. It has weaknesses. The phenomena we care about, especially as psychologists, don’t usually lend themselves to being well-explained by one specific lens.

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

PhD student Nina Curko and I wrote a short article about the superpowers of memory! Now published in Frontiers for Young Minds: kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10....

Love this article! We need more real-life memory studies. Here is an example study and review from our lab…child development focus. cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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!

New publication from our lab: Brain Dynamics during Architectural Experience: Prefrontal and Hippocampal Regions Track Aesthetics and Spatial Complexity 1st author is Lara Gregorian, with collaborators @pfvelasco.bsky.social Zita Patai and Fiona Zisch Stimuli: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next. New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

A memory can be represented at different levels of granularity, from highly specific to generalized. Different representational formats of a memory can be used at different times or in different contexts, and draw on different neural representations. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Our cognitive maps of the environment contain hierarchical structure, with some spaces nested in others. Behavioral responses and brain activity in scene-responsive regions reflect this hierarchical structure. Neat new work by Michael Peer & @russellepstein.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs

Neuromorphic hierarchical modular reservoirs | doi.org/10.1101/2025... How does hierarchical modularity shape computational function? ⤵️

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...

New book— just got my copy! I know people often don’t read book chapters but I think that’s a mistake. They are usually much more reflective and wide ranging than journal articles.

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 !

Lab’s latest is out in Imaging Neuroscience, led by Kirsten Peterson: “Regularized partial correlation provides reliable functional connectivity estimates while correcting for widespread confounding”, where we demonstrate a major improvement to standard fMRI functional connectivity (correlation) 1/n

Interested in hippocampal dynamics and their interactions with cortical rhythms? Our physically constrained model of cortico-hippocampal interactions - complete with fast geometrically informed numerical simulation (available at embedded github repo) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

🚀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

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 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 &👇

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...

Ever wondered why you keep going to that restaurant with stale fries? Is it because you went often in the past (perseveration) or because you remember past good experiences better (positivity bias)? Our study out in PNAS investigates the normative basis for these biases www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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!

Tour de force review on “Economics of Attention” by Loewenstein just published in J Econ Lit @aeajournals.bsky.social #behavioraleconomics

Excited to present our new work reading minds! Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6

For >5 years, the International Sleep Replay Workshops have brought together scientists studying sleep & memory. The next ISRW will be on March 6th in Vancouver (before @CogNeuroNews). Follow the link for details and to join the mailing list. isrw.bio.uci.edu Pls retweet!

Thank you so much, Lynn @choosetobecurious.bsky.social, for having me on the podcast! In our conversation, I reflect on my research journey into curiosity, share insights from our current developmental and educational projects, and even tap into my poetic side. Choose To Be Curious with us! 😊

Flatland! Such a useful analogy for scientists about the difference between models vs reality, maps vs territories, etc!

Out now: a unique multi-lab collaboration led by @matthiasnau.bsky.social showing that recalling a movie reactivates both neural and gaze patterns for sequences of scenes!