Changes in our feelings, or "affective surprise," may act as a learning signal that influences what we remember. Large magnitude deviations in experienced valence during encoding relate to better long-term associative memory.

It’s out!

Unsolicited PSA: Asking your gay friend about Heated Rivalry may be a microaggression. Btw I thought it was great but not excellant. Some of the romance felt undeserved.

I love old Bjork>>>>I love new Bjork>>>>>>I love New York

When giving feedback on a talk I came to a real truism: Seinfeld is for people that love New York, Friends is for people that love the idea of New York. I like Friends.

This pup found a stick shaped like an old timey pipe earlier today and has already solved three mysteries. 13/10

First lesson of 2026 is that I can’t trim my mustache freehand.

Love: A paper with humans and rodents doing analogous tasks. Historic example: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25636175/ Did I say historic to make @joeydunsmoor.bsky.social feel old, 🤷🏾

We are excited to announce our partnership with @inclivio.com's software for #SAS2026. We’re counting down to the conference with a series of posts. Enter a drawing for 3 EMA study licenses by liking (1 point) and reposting (3 points)! #SAS #AffectiveScience #EMA #EmotionDynamics

Agency reorganizes memory around relevant decisions. This was collaboration the deeply missed Sarah DuBrow and steer-headed by our grad students @lindsayrait.bsky.social and Elizabeth Horwath. p.s. the task design involves curating gift baskets. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41436249/

Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.

Love: my list of best friends 80% overlaps with my list of favorite collaborators.

Finally time to share all the things I love about this field all of 2026. Love: papers that have present an fMRI finding first that inspires a behavioral study to confirm a mechanism. For example: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25319696/

Ok this may be a biased hot take, but I think the villain in stranger things is homophobia. But I also thought the same thing about K-pop Demon Hunters and Friends.

Seeing a lot of fiction in academic Bluesky over the break. Here is a paragraph I like from Brandon Sanderson’s “Tress of the Emerald”:

Hate: Myself for getting old enough to think my hot takes matter. What a conundrum, because that is a hot take.

Hate: when people design their tasks around a computational model, as opposed to designing their model to a task. This is real progress because I used to use to just hate computational models…..

Hate: Bayesian chauvinism, not to be confused with Bayesian enthusiasm which I love.

Hate: Overextending claims about psychology/cognitive neuroscience based on resting-state fMRI

This new year my resolution is to try to be more positive. So until then I will list a bunch of things I hate to get it out of my system. Hate: the intersection of toxic masculinity, podcasts, and neuroscience

If Congress is so concerned with defining athletes by genetics (sex assigned at birth), why stop there? Height, lung capacity, and muscle fiber type are genetic too — maybe we should ban athletes over 6 feet to “level the playing field.” I’m so disappointed. Also wtf that I align with Ted Cruz.

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

Coming from a conference… PSA: Let’s stop using sanity check with your data. I think it low key undermines mental health inclusivity. I like validation check as an alternative. Not a PSA, but a personal thing: I have never found data sexy and never will.

My current mantra: If mini-backpacks came back, one day government funding will too.

Strong endorse. Nina is the best and at the cutting edge of multiple fields all at once!

Excited to share that my TEDx talk is finally available online. I loved sharing what the science shows us: that it's time to reframe adolescence - from problem to ✨ potential ✨ 1/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr8V...

Great, I come back from Canada to see that Trump ruined poop jokes.

Last Friday, Curtis Phills and I ran our first conference! Introducing CODES. The Consortium of Oregon Diversity and Equity Scholars! We were excited to bring together folks across Oregon who do diversity science work. We need community more than ever. Hope we can continue this in future years...

I promised my nieces we would make moonbeam ice cream when I came to visit. Hivemind, what should that mean. I am currently thinking ice cream, mini marshmallows, and silver sprinkles.

The great thing about AOL instant messenger was that you knew when your friends were free to chat. I wish my cell phone contacts had that.

2026 @jocn.bsky.social Travel Fellowship @jocn.bsky.social and Cog. Neurosci. Soc. to offer a stipend of $3000, plus waived conf. reg. and waived poster submission fee to attend www.cogneurosociety.org/annual-meeti... , to one trainee based at an institution located in each of five regions:

New review paper with Maverick Smith on improving memory for stuff people actually want to remember: doi.org/10.1177/0963...

Tenure Pro-Tip: If you are ever worried about your ego inflating, take a U-Jam dance class at the YMCA that has far too many windows.

Umm my non-science friend wanted to roast me, and fed my papers into chat GPT. I would have guessed that deeply hurtful comments would have to come from people that know me well, but ouch.

Tenure pro tip: Playing Mars, Bringer of War during an automatic car wash really elevates the experience.

Good news! My lab isn’t a failure 🤷🏾 . Jkjkjk they are the best!

Resistance is hard. It is likely better for my mental health to dissociate from the constant threats to my identity as a researcher and queer man. But dissociating also undermines my authenticity as a person. Maybe the solution is continued resistance but fostering joy and silliness along the way.

When an eyewitness shares a memory, what might make a jury perceive it as accurate? 👩🏽⚖️ A recent #psynomPBR paper by Martinez et al. suggests that certain communication styles shape how accurate a memory seems, regardless of its actual accuracy. Post by Alyssa Asmar. buff.ly/S4SeOyo

Not all voting has to be bad and malicious (Re: big stupid bill). Psychonomic Society voted two of my favorite researchers for mid-career awards! Congrats Jason Chein and Shayna Rosenbaum!!! @mindimager.bsky.social

Advice for junior colleagues: If you are feeling old bike to graduation in regalia and everyone will tell you congratulations and you can pretend you are 28 getting your PhD.

Where were the minions on January 6th? That’s what I want to know.

Advice for junior colleagues: If you get a large matcha smoothie you can use it’s a microphone to sing Break Free by Ariana Grande. I didn’t learn this til post tenure.

Oh man, what a self-own. A govt lawyer brought up DEI in passing, Judge Young was Not Happy: "If putting these words together, DEI, is somehow offensive... does that mean our policy is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion? Are you going to stand there and tell me that's now the policy of the NIH?"

Remember when science social media could be fun. Real housewives research taglines go. I’m like consolidation, your fear makes me stronger.

One student *did* write a cognition haiku at the end of their exam! “Saccades, to and fro Attend to the relevance Select, remember.” I love it! #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky

Status update: Billie Eilish is everything!

"Scientists might also be realizing that there’s little safety in silence." #SpeakOut www.science.org/content/arti...

I'm looking for a new full-time research assistant ("junior specialist"). It's not quite "lab manager" because I have someone who takes care of the administrative tasks, and here I'm looking for someone to help us get research done! Info is below, please pass on to any talented candidates, thanks!

NIH IRTA program resumes recruitment. Good sign!

A helpful read on some of the legal avenues for appeal. What the new administration is doing to #NIH (& other HHS orgs like #CDC, #FDA) is not only economically wasteful but blatantly, morally bankrupt. People will be more sick and die needlessly as a result of these actions, now and in the future.