🚨 New Preprint 🚨 I’m excited to share the first paper from my postdoc. We found age differences in the timescales of neural activity in the hippocampus during movie viewing 👀 These timescales were related to memory specificity in an interesting way (spoiler: the hippocampus may not be special!?)

Excited to share our new preprint: "Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centered Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment" led by @binxia.bsky.social w @ken-lxl.bsky.social & co-senior author Luke Dickens (UCL) 🤖🧵👇 Link: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07462 🧠📈#PsychSciSky #compneuro #mlsky /1

Our brains cling to stability: when scenes slowly change, people still see the original for longer than expected. This AI-image study shows that perception lags behind reality -our minds favor continuity over constant reprocessing. doi.org/10.1037/xhp0... @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

Stop by Poster E73 tomorrow to learn about: 🧠 an LLM pipeline for automated recall scoring, and 📖 how we (@atabk.bsky.social @nicholebouffard.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social) use it to understand whether compressed memories can be unfolded to recover details #CNS2026

Come see our posters #CNS2026. All three are on session D Monday morning. Fantastic works from Xuan Zhang with @brianlevine.bsky.social, Dr. Erik Wing with @drjenryan.bsky.social and Dr. Lei Zhang with Dr. Claude Alain.

Our lab will be presenting at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference this year #CNS2026! Learn more from our graduate students in their sessions! @catalinayang.bsky.social and @matthewdougherty.bsky.social

🧠 The MackLab (@drmack.bsky.social) will be presenting at #CNS2026! Stop by our posters to chat about learning, insight, and hippocampus!

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz

Super excited to present my new research at CNS next week! Ever wondered why memory is so inconsistent? This project explores how shifts in attention heavily contribute to this inconsistency 👀 Come see me at Data Blitz Session 1 (Talk 5, Saturday @ 10:30am) and Poster Session D (#53, Monday 8-10am)!

🎉 New preprint 🎉 with Olya Bulatova, @drmack.bsky.social & @keisukefukuda.bsky.social! We decode shapes in working memory from EEG and show that representations are task-dependent, flexibly integrating information about category and task during the memory delay

How do hippocampal pathways contribute to learning regularities and exceptions? To answer this, Melisa Gumus & @drmack.bsky.social use diffusion imaging to identify the endpoints of different hippocampal pathways, and then analyze functional activity within those "footprints". Super innovative!

Building Bridges in Brain Data. The event will focus on open science practices, innovative methods, and community in the neurosciences, with opportunities to engage in collaborative projects or explore new tools. No prior expertise is required. Registration for BrainHack 2026 is still open!

What determines the perception of orientations in visual cortex, sharp contours or oriented spatial frequencies? It's the contours, the building blocks for shape. Brilliant paper by Seohee Han out in Scientific Reports: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

Bridges can anchor communities as landmarks and even tourist destinations, blend into their environment unnoticed, or they can be eyesores. What determines the aesthetic quality of bridges? Mei Yang, @damianoc.bsky.social, Paul Gauvreau, and I explore this question here: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Energy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! Strong evidence in silico and humans, out in PNAS Nexus: tinyurl.com/3kbu8xw4 With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition". Intuitive cell types are found in random artificial networks using the same selection criteria neuroscientists use with actual data. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 1/2

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

🥳 Congrats on your first preprint! 🧠🧠🧠

Excited to share that our new paper, “Predictive Looking and Predictive Looking Errors in Everyday Activities,” is now out in JEP: General! 🧠 We examined how people’s eye movements reveal both their predictions and their prediction errors while they watch everyday actions. 👇

The Budding Minds Lab at the University of Toronto is hiring a Postdoc in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of memory 🧠 🫧 This is (one of) my graduate labs and I can't recommend the department's people, resources, location, or culture strongly enough! see buddingmindslab.utoronto.ca for more

I'm pleased to share our new paper, "Attention to complex scene features", now published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics! We investigated how well traditional attention theories generalize to complex scene features, using AI-generated stimuli. Check out the paper here: rdcu.be/elLFK

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...

Happy to share our study showing a new role for ventromedial PFC in prospection. tinyurl.com/e7kudkby #neuroskyence #psychscisky

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...

Super excited to share the preprint we've been working on, "On a roll: Recent familiarity primes the brain to retrieve other memories via dopaminergic nuclei responses"! Check it out, and come see us at CNS if you're around this afternoon! drive.google.com/drive/u/0/fo...

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...

#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!

Curious about how individual differences in episodic memory traits relate to changes in memory performance over time? Come check out my poster on Sunday, 5-7pm, poster session C, board 66. #CNS2025

Energy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! We find strong evidence in silico and human observers! osf.io/preprints/ps... With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

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

People like round contours better than angular contours. Where and how is curvature represented in the brain? With indoor architecture we found a neural dissociation between subjective curvature and computational curvature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share a new preprint with Elizabeth McDevitt, Ghootae Kim, and Nick Turk-Browne investigating the role of REM sleep in neural differentiation of memories in the hippocampus! URL: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.01.621588v1 (1/9)

Looking forward to presenting my work on exception learning at #VSS2024! Come see my poster in the morning of May 18 to discuss how prefrontal, hippocampal, and visual areas can distinctively support the learning of complex visual categories with exceptional items!

#TAMeG2024 is coming! May 7 2024 @YorkUniversity 🎯 27 talks 🎯 @tyrellturing.bsky.social keynote 🎯panel on epi mem and AI @aronowitz.bsky.social @WilCunningham @tyrellturing.bsky.social & @morganbarense 🍻 reception (cash bar!), awards, powerpoint karaoke! tameg.ca

🎉 My first first-author paper is now published in PBR! @drmack.bsky.social and l used novel computational modeling & behavioral approaches to show how selective pattern differentiation and integration support learning and generalization of category exceptions! link.springer.com/article/10.3...

We are looking for candidates for a unique postdoc opportunity to work on the role of perceptual grouping in human and computer vision with Sven Dickinson, Kaleem Siddiqi, Zygmunt Pizlo and me. www.bwlab.org/postdoc-posi... Please repost.

Come check out our lab's posters at #CNS2024 Featuring work from @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social , June-Kyo Kim, and Marcus Meng

I will be presenting my poster on Sunday at 5-7pm. Come to chat about edge functional connectivity and how it can be applied to study the neural dynamics in narrative event processing! #CNS2024

Check us out at #cns2024: Sat.: Erik Wing shows how experts’ schemas (🦆) accelerate training-induced functional & structural (!) cortical plasticity. Keela Thomson on how kids (👶) see the world differently (literally!).  Hannah Marlatte on youths’ PTSD symptoms & its impact on scene construction (🎑)

Interested in chatting about how retrieval can enhance real-world event #memory while also introducing disorganization and distortion? If so, check out my poster with Morgan Barense this Monday from 8-10 am (D49). We'd love to get feedback on this new work! #CNS2024

Brief category learning distorts the perceptual space of complex scenes! Our new paper is now in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: link.springer.com/article/10.3....  @drmack.bsky.social @dirkbwalther.bsky.social