Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Curious what a representation of "everything" you know might look like? Wonder how you might fill it in? Check out our demo and paper (led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social and now out in @natcomms.nature.com ), or read on to learn more! Demo: context-lab.com/mapper/ Paper: www.doi.org/10.1038/s414...

New preprint! ✨ Do you and your partner have made-up words ("eggy" to mean awkward)? Do you and your bestie have an anecdote you love to tell together (that time one of you tripped over an acorn)? Do you and your closest colleague have a cherished ritual (weekly lunch at "the usual spot")? 🧵

Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience — a Perspective by Stephan Pohl, Edgar Y. Walker, David L. Barack, Jennifer Lee, Rachel N. Denison, Ned Block, Florent Meyniel & Wei Ji Ma www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/ 🚨 New preprint Key Moments Scaffold the Semantic Structure of Narratives Using spoken recall and annotations from three naturalistic datasets with topic modeling, we ask: which parts of a narrative contribute most to its semantic structure and subsequently memory? Preprint: osf.io/dcfvw

🚨 New paper! Think of a place you feel deeply attached to. When you're in that place, do you feel like your life is more meaningful? New work from @ashleykrause.bsky.social suggests you probably do! Just accepted at Journal of Environmental Psychology, we find places can give our life meaning 🧵

Are episodic and semantic memory really that different? Using closely matched tasks, we found no substantial neural differences between recalling personal experiences and general knowledge: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02390-4

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!

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.

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

Excited to announce that I'll be officially starting a new role as an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph as of today—looking forward to working with all the amazing students, faculty, and members of the Guelph community!! ✨

I'm surprised I only came across it now, but this review on improving communication in data visualization is excellent. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I recently discovered Conventional Comments (conventionalcomments.org) for providing a pseudo-standard set of labels for feedback and just tried it for an article review and it was really helpful to specify issues vs. thoughts vs. suggestions, etc. Hopefully it's helpful for the authors too!

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social. Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative. A 2 min demo (and a short thread): 1/7

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...

Now on CRAN, ggdiagram is a #ggplot2 extension that draws diagrams programmatically in #Rstats. Allows for precise control in how objects, labels, and equations are placed in relation to each other. wjschne.github.io/ggdiagram/ar...

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...

We make predictions based on general knowledge and/or specific memories. Different brain areas are active when these distinct predictions are violated – and hippocampus selectively responds to prediction errors based on episodic memory. Cool work by @chrismbird.bsky.social @ayab.bsky.social et al!

Happy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...

📣 New preprint from the SCIMaP team! Across three studies, we show that communicating the economic impact of NIH funding cuts—especially with interactive quizzes and maps—decreases approval and motivates action to oppose the cuts, across the political spectrum. 🧵 1/8 osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

📢 New commentary out today in Nature Human Behaviour! We argue that behavior change interventions often suffer from a one-sided success focus. But failures may reveal structural barriers people face. 🔗 rdcu.be/ex8hR #BehavioralScience #PublicPolicy

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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...

In our first “Postdoc perspectives” essay, @fleabrained.bsky.social and @maribel-patino.bsky.social explain how grassroots organizations led by trainees are stepping up to provide career and mentorship guidance for neuroscience students from marginalized backgrounds. #neuroskyence bit.ly/4csFx0B

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.

Are you doing EMA research and wonder how to go about it? In recent work we've adressed some open questions and challenges, here is a brief summary of papers and materials. 🧵 #PsychSciSky 🧪 #StatsSky

Thrilled to see this paper out in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social after years of work by Drs. @diamondn.bsky.social and @stefsimpson.bsky.social, with Drs. Stuart Fogel, Daniel Baena, and Brian J Murray! @baycrestfoundation.bsky.social

Grateful for the chance to share my thoughts on responsible use of LLMs in psychology research @spspnews.bsky.social #spsp2025. Here's a summary of my presentation for those who missed it. Thanks to @ashwinia.bsky.social for organizing this panel! How should LLMs be used in psychology research? 🧵

“I am in here!” It's a sentiment I've seen expressed time and time again from non-speaking autistic individuals who were thought to be unable to express their thoughts - but ultimately gained access to communication. Hearing this call, my research is expanding in some new directions.

Excited to share this perspective with @yaelniv.bsky.social about how schemas might be learned and instantiated via reinforcement learning, latent cause inference, and dimensionality reduction, and what's the medial prefrontal cortex might be doing for all of these www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A exhibition at Waterloo architecture collects memories and mementos of Toronto's Chinatown, along with scale models of restaurants, to reimagine community heritage through storytelling. spacing.ca/toronto/2025...

Thrilled to share our latest work on the importance of considering social identities in brain imaging research, now out in @natureneuro.bsky.social. rdcu.be/d4XWM

We have a new paper explaining all the ways you can use natural language processing to analyze text data in @natrevpsych.bsky.social We provide user friendly recommendations for using NLP to ensure rigour and reproducibility Here is a free link: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Honored that a piece I wrote made it to NYTimes. It’s about how my mom’s stroke changed my connection to time, science, and nature. What a privilege to honor my mom in Modern Love. Below is a gift link. Let me know your thoughts 🙏🏼 www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/s...

Our JSS article is out! And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned. www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

It takes a LONG time to manually score autobiographical memory narratives for internal and external details (in Autobiographical Interview terms). Here, we report a new model that automates this process, matching manual scorers, but much faster (5s instead of 10m per memory). osf.io/preprints/ps...

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.

How can we motivate action to address climate change? We tested 17 psych interventions at once in a tournament! @falklab.bsky.social If you’re attending #psynom24, come to my talk from 11:40-12 TOMORROW (11/22) to find out the winning strategies! Marquis B-C! @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

OK folks, I've started an episodic memory starter pack. By no means a full list so reply below if you're an episodic memory nerd! go.bsky.app/2mtNK43

New starter pack: people doing science with narratives, naturalistic memory, natural conversations, and using language models for psych/cog sci 📖💻📚 (Reply with 🙋 if you'd like to be added!) go.bsky.app/LGRYMvQ