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 &👇

New preprint! 🧠 Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10). doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#neuroskyence #academicsky #psychskyscience #psychology

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We’re surprised in many situations, like surprise parties, lab tasks, & suspenseful basketball games. Despite being in completely different situations, does our brain process unexpectedness similarly? 1/9

For my first post on bsky I am thrilled to advertise an NIMH-funded open postdoc position in my lab in collaboration with Jen Wildes at UChicago. Please spread the word! For more info and instructions to apply, please see: bakkourlab.uchicago.edu/join-us/post...

How do we resolve competition between memories to behave adaptively? Hippocampal differentiation of competing memories predicts the precision of preparatory coding in visual cortex during memory-guided attention Excited to share this work by the inimitable Serra Favila! #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Stress tends to enhance memory for emotional events. Yet stress is also thought to hurt the hippocampus (which supports episodic memory). With @evgoldfarb.bsky.social & others, we explore this paradox and demonstrate how cortisol can *enhance* hippocampal function to support emotional episodic mems!

First post! I'll be starting as an assistant professor at Northwestern next year! I'm recruiting PhD students this cycle! I'll be reviewing applications through the Brain, Behavior, and Cognition area in Northwestern's Department of Psychology. Apply! Learn more about the lab here: nucatslab.com

I’m excited to announce the Adaptive Memory Lab is moving to Univ. of Oregon summer 2024. I’ve been a lucky duck to forge such great relationships at Temple and am looking forward to developing new ones. I’ll be recruiting grad students next year so feel free to reach out. #OMG/OregonMemoryGroup

Resting state, or sleeping state? We know that wakefulness matters for adult functional brain network organization. In our new paper, we show that wakefulness can also be important in infant fMRI! 1/9

First empirical pub from the lab! Fear generalization - spreading ⚡️ assoc to similar stimuli - characterizes anxiety. Here we show that 🍷 assoc also spread to similar stimuli for indiv engaging in risky drinking pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37682597/