Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out! www.momentslab.org

New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes? The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions. Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The cerebellum isn’t just about coordinating movement. It’s implicated in nearly every domain of cognition—from language to social behavior. But how exactly does the cerebellum contribute to action and cognition? 🧵 Check out our new paper w/ Rich Ivry. arxiv.org/abs/2509.09818

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS! @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social By me + Hanna Hillman We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

By integrating the 'pinging' technique with fMRI-based multivariate pattern analysis, we provide evidence for a dual-format representation of attention during the preparatory period. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Representational Geometries of Perception and Working Memory: A Pilot Study Tomoya Nakamura's first fMRI project ... in which we hereby release a preprint as a way of pre-registration 🧠📈

New preprint! 🚨We discuss the long-term memory consequences of fast visual perceptual learning: "From sudden perceptual learning to enduring engrams: A representational perspective" It's so great to work with @jvoeller.bsky.social and the team! Congrats for your first author manuscript, Johannah!

Update: the deadline for the Biological Basis of Behavior has been extended to Sept 18th! ✨ aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05054 Please reach out to Linda Wilbrecht if you have any questions about the position.

I'm delighted to share that, together with @crowbrain.bsky.social our paper on time estimation in crows is now published in @natcomms.nature.com We found that crows not only keep track of time, but individual neurons prefer different time durations 🐦⏱️🧠 Check it out: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Applying to the NSF-GRFP (or another fellowship) on a tight deadline? We built a 7-week guide + timeline to get you from draft to submission. It’s not too late — you’ve got this! ✨ 🔗 cientificolatino.com/apply-in-7-weeks #NSFGRFP #GradSchool #Fellowship

📢 New preprint! How do humans learn from arbitrary, abstract goals? We show that, when goal spaces can be compressed, costly working-memory processes give way to internalized reward functions, enabling efficient goal-dependent reinforcement learning. @annecollins.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2509.06810

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

I'm happy to now be able to share a talk I gave at TEDx New England last Fall!  The talk is about our lab's work on what makes decisions costly, and how to make them less so. I discuss lessons for all kinds of decisions, including getting people to vote. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeHg...

UC Davis is hiring! A tenure-track assistant professor of psychology, in human cognition or cognitive neuroscience #psychjobs recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07300

Are you an early career researcher (undergrad to postdoc) who could use advice about navigating peer review? Are you stuck on a manuscript submission or revision? Have general questions about peer review? Schedule a 30-min chat with any member of @reviewerzero.bsky.social! We'd love to help 😊

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well? We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics. 📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

New preprint from the lab! 🧠 Led by Juliana Trach, w/ Sophia Ou Using fMRI, we discovered evidence for time-sensitive reward prediction errors (RPEs) in the human cerebellum. Builds on, and extends, recent work in both rodents and NHPs

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬? We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do! Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

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...

So happy to share our paper on the role of the hippocampus as a mismatch detector: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We show that the hippocampus detects mismatches between ongoing experiences and episodic memories but not generalised schematic knowledge. See 🧵for how we got here: #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Another new-ish paper: Events in the stream of behavior Maverick Smith, @jzacks.bsky.social, and I discuss how the brain (esp. the Default Mode Network) represents event models, leveraging different information domains and scales of information processing. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain. Intriguing new preprint by Roy & Naselaris et al for anyone interested in mental imagery! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Next up, from @atabk.bsky.social and @wouterkool.bsky.social: Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure. In sum, Ata stuck hidden (and shifting) rules into a word list learning task, creating "events" that influenced the structure of recall. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I'm a behind on shouting out new papers! From Angelique Delarazan: Narrative Coherence Warps the Timeline of Recalled Naturalistic Events. In sum, when recalling stories, people systematically deviate from temporal organization to follow the narrative threads. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

1/ 🚨 Preprint alert! How does the brain make sense of continuous experience? We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall. 👉 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233

Memories that remain: Image memorability transfers to scene descriptions: https://osf.io/mg7zk

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall. Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

🧪 And House appropriators say: no cuts to NIH budget! House subcommittee version just came out (link below). Holds NIH flat at $48 billion. To be clear: this is far from over. But a good sign that science still matters across both sides of aisle. YOUR VOICE MATTERS!!

New opinion piece! @amirtal.bsky.social and I argue that "wake reactivation" is not a scientifically useful construct; It encompasses nonconscious & conscious processes w/ varying levels of elaboration & diverging consequences, leading to conflicting results authors.elsevier.com/a/1lgli4sIRvW-LQ

Our target discussion article out in Cognitive Neuroscience! It will be followed by peer commentary and our responses. If you would like to write a commentary, please reach out to the journal! 1/18 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @cibaker.bsky.social @susanwardle.bsky.social

Check out @tifenpan.bsky.social 's just published paper! we demonstrate how to use RNNs to infer latent variables from cognitive models, even when standard methods don't work easily.

Need to control visual similarity in your experiments? A new open database by Robbins and colleagues @michaelhout.bsky.social @haywardgodwin.bsky.social, published in #psynomBRM, maps similarity among 1,200 objects in 20 categories using MDS—validated & ready to use.

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Excited to present our new work reading minds! Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6

Our new study (Titled: Memory Loves Company) asks whether working memory hold more when objects belong together. And yes, when everyday objects are paired meaningfully (Bow-Arrow), people remember them better than when they’re unrelated (Glass-Arrow). (mini thread)

Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that! Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

After scrolling Twitter, it will take you a while to get back into “work mode”. Why is this the case? Our new work (out now in Psych Review), led by Ivan Grahek and Xiamin Leng, explores the costs of adjusting cognitive control to meet different goals: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... 🧵 A thread:

Here's a set of new results from my lab asking how the brain combines different ideas (concepts)! Now in press at J of Cog Neuro, we looked at how semantic composition (combining different concepts together) shapes brain activity. Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence

Happy to share our new preprint. We found that brain adaptively switches between relational and item-based coding strategies based on the structure of memory contents. @doellerlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint from Yining Ding @liliand.bsky.social! People use semantic event knowledge and grouping to remember the temporal order of events. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our new paper using transformers to understanding scene semantics has finally dropped in Open Mind. Fully open access. #cognition #percepton (If you follow me for music you can ignore this one.) direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

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

(link fixed) New theory: Categorization is Baked Into the Brain It is not at the end of sensory processing but a core computation that begins at the earliest stages, occurring throughout the cortex as predictive feedback shapes feedforward processing. #neuroscience doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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!

Is the hippocampus best understood in term of discrete subfields or functional gradients? Functional gradients are recapitulated within each hippocampal subfield, supporting a role for both discrete & continuously changing computations. Neat work by Bouffard, @barense.bsky.social, & Moscovitch!

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I can't quite believe it – I got a new NSF grant! 😲🤯 I'm incredibly grateful to the program officers & reviewers for their dedication and efforts to keep science going 🌟👏🏼 So, I'll be hiring! Looking for a postdoc to study competition in memory-guided attention. See flyer for details! 🎉

Successful wayfinding requires an "internal compass" – a representation of the direction we're facing. Where is this internal compass in the brain? When humans navigate a virtual city, the retrosplenial complex & superior parietal lobe keep track of facing direction across distinct environments.

Slowly making my way through that grad school data! Decoding memory function through naturalistic gaze patterns | PNAS share.google/vuOSbiRk9nBH...