🚨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

The 6x US memory champion – Nelson Dellis – can memorize a deck of cards in 40 seconds and knows the first 10K digits of pi. To figure out how, he let us peak inside his brain. Here is what we learned in our precision brain mapping study www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... youtube.com/shorts/MryMq...

I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠

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!

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions rdcu.be/eRVUk

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

🧠 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

My lab is recruiting a postdoc and a full-time research technician to work on an NIH-funded project studying age-related changes in memory for naturalistic events. Behavior, fMRI, and blood-based biomarkers. 3+ years funding guaranteed. Postdoc: tinyurl.com/ykjfbnj8 Tech: tinyurl.com/2f2hw3f5

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

New preprint: Inference over hidden contexts shapes the geometry of conceptual knowledge for flexible behaviour. In this pre-reg study, our core claim was that we don’t just learn stimulus-reward. We infer hidden context and that inference re-wires attention and neural state space on the fly. 1/8

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

We're thrilled to announce the publication of our newest paper in @plosone.org 🎉 "Aging and episodic memory specificity: Evidence challenging a domain-general pattern separation decline" Read Dr. Youm's full paper here: doi.org/10.1371/jour... @melaniecohn.bsky.social #Memory #Psychology #Aging

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 🧪

When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com Work with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @tsonj.bsky.social, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

🧠🚨 How does the hippocampus transform the visual similarity space to resolve memory interference? In this new preprint, we found that the hippocampus sequentially inverts the behaviorally relevant dimensions of similarity 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hippocampal transformations occur along dimensions of memory interference https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.682242v1

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!

Years ago my lab tried to brainstorm ways to separately manipulate low-level (texture/pattern) and high-level (scene/object) image properties, for studying visual representations in the brain. Thanks to imaginative work by PhD student Zall Hirschstein, we now have a stimulus set that does just that!

🚀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

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory! We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵1/9

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab! We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

I'm excited to share a new preprint! We built a digital, scalable intervention to reduce intrusive memories, combining an AI chatbot with LLM scoring of human-AI conversations and pupillometry predictors of effort and intervention success. I hope you enjoy! arxiv.org/abs/2507.01081

New paper from our lab in which we show that altered arousal in Autism Spectrum Disorders reduces episodic memory for emotional events. Stronger effects with age support an accelerated aging hypothesis of ASD. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🧠 Paper out! We investigated how hippocampal and cortical ripples support memory during movie watching. We found that: 🎬 Hippocampal ripples mark event boundaries 🧩 Cortical ripples predict later recall Ripples may help transform real-life experiences into lasting memories! rdcu.be/eui9l

Do girls and boys really differ in their mathematical skills? A recent @nature.com paper by @standehaene.bsky.social et al shows that French boys and girls enter school with similar abilities, but after just four months, boys pull ahead 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint! 🚨→ Determinants of Visual Ambiguity Resolution. A new work with @ortiztudela.bsky.social @jvoeller.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social We created ~2k images and collected ~100k responses to study visual ambiguity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...

New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it. We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation. rdcu.be/el18q A short thread follows for those interested. 1/n

Major team effort on phase-locked stim of human hippocampal theta rhythms finally out in the wild! W/ @jkragel.bsky.social @alikwidge.bsky.social and a cast of many. Thanks to the BRAIN Initiative for making it possible. rdcu.be/ej7VE

🧠✨How do we rebuild our memories? In our new study, we show that hippocampal ripples kickstart a coordinated expansion of cortical activity that helps reconstruct past experiences. We recorded iEEG from patients during memory retrieval... and found something really cool 👇(thread)

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!

New paper from my lab! @moorecogneuro.bsky.social shows that memory brain states are diminished or less robustly engaged in healthy older adults compared to young and middle-aged adults. longtermmemorylab.com/wp-content/u...

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...

Check out our latest paper today in Nature: “Goal specific hippocampal inhibition gates learning” www.nature.com/articles/s41... By Nuri Jeong, Xiao Zheng, Abby Paulson, Steph Prince and colleagues.

New preprint! Excited to share our latest work “Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry” ft. outstanding former undergraduate Chandra Fincke, @glajoie.bsky.social, @krishnaswamylab.bsky.social, and @wutsaiyale.bsky.social's Nick Turk-Browne 1/8

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! 📖🧠

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 going to #CNS2025, please stop by my poster (C36) on Sunday evening to find out more about this paper and episodic memory's multidimensional scrutiny! 🤓

I couldn't be more proud of this amazing work from @soroushmirjalili.bsky.social. It's innovative and exciting, using novel ML methods to investigate the idea that episodic memory can be deconstructed into its component cognitive functions to understand why we remember some events and forget others.

Why do we remember some events but forget others? In our recent work published at @naturecomms.bsky.social, @audreyduarte.bsky.social and I used machine learning to simultaneously quantify multiple cognitive components of episodic memory. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/11

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very excited to share that this paper from my time in the Kahana lab is finally out in @natureneuro.bsky.social! bsky.app/profile/natu...

Remember what your partner said during a heated argument? Or the rush of getting your first job offer? Why do these emotionally arousing moments stick? Across 3 studies, and 3 arousal measures, we found that emotional arousal enhances memory encoding by promoting functional integration in the 🧠 1/🧵

Why do we remember so many details of our experiences even when it is unclear if we will actually ever need them? In a new preprint, @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I asked whether this property is adaptive, because what will be relevant in the future often (usually?!) isn’t apparent.

The official link to apply for the postdoc position in my lab is live. Please pass it along! utaustin.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UTstaff/job/...