Memorability as an Emergent Property: How Representational Structure Creates Apparent Intrinsic Effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

Students, if you’re thinking about dropping a note to that teacher or professor about what their class/project/mentorship has meant to you, but you worry it will be cringe or cheesy, let me just tell you they will coast on the fuzzy feelings prompted by that note for months, if not years

Breaking: Congress is pushing back on the Trump administration's termination of National Science Board members, with the House calling for their reinstatement and the Senate asking pointed questions about OMB's political interference. My reporting for @science.org:

How does the brain rapidly distinguish similar memories? We use 7T fMRI to show dynamic shifts between pattern separation and reinstatement signals in hippocampal CA3 and DG with changing task demands: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Very excited to have this officially published: A neural state space for episodic memories A brief thread... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪 @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Incredibly proud of the newest PhD from the lab, Dr. Craig Poskanzer! He gave a phenomenal defense yesterday showcasing his work on how internal & external attention are balanced in the brain and behavior. Passed with no revisions except two typos. And his wife made a beautiful hippocampus cake!

For further context, and in contrast to what the IHE article from yesterday stated, the hack is very much still ongoing (it appears that Instructure tried to fix the Canvas breach, but the hackers got around the patches again today). www.thedp.com/article/2026...

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

The final typeset version of this paper is online now! Check out the new analysis approach that Narjes developed to track changes in event structure at multiple timescales, allowing us to see how event dynamics in a film clip change with repeated viewing

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Past experiences shape current selection. But when and how strong are past and present targets represented in the brain? In our newest paper, we show that past and present search targets are concurrently represented in the brain. Out now in @plosbiology.org doi.org/10.1371/jour... #neuroscience

What do we look for when searching for objects in our daily-life environments? Very happy that I can now share this review, together with @suryagayet.bsky.social , @predictivebrain.bsky.social and @peelen.bsky.social🥳 A brief thread below!

the ppl we thank in acknowledgement sections are "a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations (i.e., coauthorship), even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be joining @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social Psychology as an assistant professor in Fall 2026 🐻💙🐻💛 Deep thanks to my students and colleagues at NUS for four formative years, and to the advisors, family, and friends who've supported me throughout.

I’ve adored my undergrad memory seminar this semester. I guess the feeling was mutual because today they all showed up to office hours together, with flowers, a hand-drawn card, and muffins. We had a group hug, took photos, and chatted. It was the most wholesome event of my teaching career 😭😭😭

Pleased to share that our MEG and eye-tracking study of visual memory formation, saccades, & alpha oscillations is now published (as a Featured Article!) in the Journal of Neuroscience! Full paper here: doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... w/ Jed Meltzer @drjenryan.bsky.social @rosannaolsen.bsky.social

New paper out in J. Neuro! We used MEG and pattern classifiers to ask: if a memory is reactivated in the brain, does that mean you'll recall it? Short answer: no. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1... Read on for the details! [1/7] #neuroscience #memory

Want to provide constructive and fair reviews, rather than unwittingly become the dreaded Reviewer 2? Join us to learn some principles for writing peer reviews that help make papers into the best versions of themselves that they can be. This is a free event on Zoom! Register below 👇🏼

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

🧠 ICOM is back! The International Conference on Memory (ICOM7) returns 26–30 July 2027 in Glasgow, bringing together researchers from neuroscience, psychology, and beyond. 🔗 Learn more and sign-up for the newsletter here: icom-memory.org #ICOM7 #MemoryResearch #Neuroscience #Psychology

Does the brain really know what word is coming next? Insight article by @rjantonello.bsky.social about fascinating research article in @elife.bsky.social by @ines-schoenmann.bsky.social, @mheilbron.bsky.social and others. elifesciences.org/articles/111... elifesciences.org/articles/106...

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

U.S. President Donald Trump has fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees the National Science Foundation. https://scim.ag/4cxQWhl

I resigned from the National Science Board in May when meaningful oversight became untenable. I respect colleagues who stayed to serve the NSB's mission. Today's news clarifies that was an erosion of oversight and function has become open elimination of the Board itself. 🧵 time.com/7285045/resi...

Manipulating attentional priority creates a trade-off between memory and sensory representations in human visual cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New work, now out in PLoS Biology. Using intracranial recordings & EEG, we find that the human STN rapidly engages / releases motor inhibition depending on task context, does so in tight accord w/ frontal cortex, and shows little to no lateralization while doing so. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Dr. Matthew Warburton and I put together a guide on "how to conduct behavioural experiments online"—something we wish we had when we were getting started. Hopefully it’s useful, and we’d very much welcome any feedback!

With so many eyes on Pittsburgh during the NFL Draft this weekend, it feels like a fitting moment to share some personal news — I'm excited to be joining the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2027!

Want to teach your undergrad Honors students or early grad students about peer review, but not sure how? 🤔 We'll do it for free! We're offering free peer review workshops for departments, ideal for advanced undergrad/early grad seminars in Psych, Neuro, and related fields. See below for details!

This looks like a significant discovery from Doris Tao's lab: Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex @nature.com "..our findings indicate that there is a previously unknown mechanism for neural representation:.." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NEW: NSF has been funding research at a fraction of its historic rate. Last week, the agency finally began distributing money to its directorates and is now likely to pick up the grantmaking pace. But these allocations also amount to substantial cuts across the sciences. My reporting:

People still store object-specific details about search targets in memory when category knowledge is 'good-enough.' w/ Ryan Williams, @keisukefukuda.bsky.social, & Susanne Ferber Object Details Persist in Visual Working Memory Regardless of Category Sufficiency for Search | osf.io/preprints/ps...

Spread the word! We are recruiting for 6 new research professors at UC Davis' California National Primate Research Center. Open rank, open area, but must leverage 🐒 resources. recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07561

Many claim memory biases toward percepts reflect corruption in sensory signals. We challenge this view by showing that ppl adapt their integration rationally w/ experience. w/ @timbrady.bsky.social Humans adaptively integrate memory and perception based on stimulus history | osf.io/preprints/ps...

🎯New preprint! The resource-rational dynamics of evidence accumulation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Evidence accumulation isn’t stationary. It is dynamically controlled to trade off information gain against cognitive effort. With Jiang Mao, Tobias Donner @donnerlab.bsky.social, Alan Stocker

New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

thrilled to share that i’ll be starting my PhD at Berkeley this fall, working with @mariamaly.bsky.social, and that I was awarded the Berkeley Fellowship to support my work! can’t wait to get started :)

How children remember time changes dramatically as they grow up & understanding that shift matters more than you might think. Two new papers from the lab's newest PhD, Dr. Owen Friend, explore what that difference looks like & what it tells us about the developing brain 🧠

We’ve got an exciting new thing to share! We have causal evidence (using TMR) that memory reactivation during sleep promotes abstract understanding of underlying structure, allowing transfer learning in a new domain with zero superficial feature overlap with the learned one.

New preprint! 🧠 How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli? By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis "From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This tenure denial is absurd! Larisa is extremely productive, has an NSF CAREER, and won multiple early career awards, among other accolades. It pains me to think about what she’s going through, having gone through a similar experience at that department (Columbia Psychology) 3 years ago.

Experts found that the White House budget request for the upcoming fiscal year could defund 54 NASA science missions, including a spacecraft currently studying Jupiter and two planned Venus missions: www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

We couldn't have done it without her.💐

Really excited about our new work on aphasia! Even in fairly profound aphasia, we can recover semantic maps through visual stimuli and use them to decode language. This is a big step! Language BCIs in aphasia might be possible!

Excited to share that our paper, “Cerebellar Contributions to Action and Cognition: Prediction, Timescale, and Continuity,” is now published in @pnas.org! Grateful to the reviewers, colleagues, and editors for their thoughtful and constructive feedback.

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

The Memory Disorders Research Society (www.memorydisorders.org) is now seeking nominations for new members! Self-nominations are welcome. Application is open until April 15 @ 11:59pm PT. Reach out if you have questions about the society or its (amazing) annual meeting! forms.gle/Qn7mchoPpaqL...

Just a reminder that 1yr ago today many dedicated NIH employees received RIF notices and started the process where many others were told they must leave their positions/ICs after years of service. The pain felt across the scientific community in the last year is also felt by those serving it.

#BIDS has been extended to #EyeTracking data! There is now a standard for organizing and sharing eye tracking, covering gaze position, pupil size, meta data, messages, and more. Great news for #OpenScience! 🎉 Martin Szinte et al: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...