I'm excited to present at the Neuroscience of the Everyday World Conference Nov 12-13 @ Boston University, in symposium "The Brain Meets the Model: Foundation Models as Windows into Naturalistic Cognition" w/ @samnastase.bsky.social Submit abstracts by July 31 www.cheninstitute.org/events-new/b...

Final paper from @hannahtarder-stoll.bsky.social's PhD! Extending her prev work by showing how two hippocampal sequences are linked together. Part of an issue on hipp predictions edited by @mariamaly.bsky.social @barense.bsky.social @peterkok.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

This work is now published in Nature Communications! We were able to train participants to have near-perfect memory for lists of 40 words - they added creative details to their memory representations that we could measure in their behavior and brains 🧠 doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Is forgetting useful? This was among the deep questions about how memories are formed and used explored at Local Circuits, a symposium that brought together leading experts in biological and artificial intelligence @columbiauniversity.bsky.social zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/symposium-me...

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

👋 Happy to see this paper published in PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2529176123 Asking: is curiosity a homeostatic drive, or a policy learned through reinforcement? How can we tell, and why does it matter? 🧵👇 With Jane Mok, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social, Caroline Marvin, and Daphna Shohamy 🙏

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...

Nice article from Columbia News on our new paper about neural representations of places and remembered items - including a video of the creative VR environment made by @xrmasiso.bsky.social ! news.columbia.edu/news/places-...

Our new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning

Columbia Psych is hiring *two* junior faculty in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience this year! If you work on cognition (broadly defined), submit your application materials as soon as possible (review starts Nov 1). If you have questions you can reach out to me by email! apply.interfolio.com/175428

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Years ago my lab tried to brainstorm ways to separately manipulate low-level (texture/pattern) and high-level (scene/object) image properties, for studying visual representations in the brain. Thanks to imaginative work by PhD student Zall Hirschstein, we now have a stimulus set that does just that!

What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !

Does watching a movie over and over make events slower or faster in the brain? With Narjes Al-Zahli and @mariamaly.bsky.social we find that different regions actually change in different directions, e.g. visual regions show finer-scale event structure and STS shows coarser-scale structure!

Out now: a unique multi-lab collaboration led by @matthiasnau.bsky.social showing that recalling a movie reactivates both neural and gaze patterns for sequences of scenes!

Check out the first paper from Halle’s lab: using a false-memory paradigm to challenge classical ideas about how memories are stored and change with age

I'm not a big poster, but had to share how proud I am of my postdoc, Lauri Gurguryan, for submitting the FIRST paper from my lab 🎉 Here, we ask a classic ? Do short- and long-term memory rely on separate or shared underlying stores Checkout the preprint: bit.ly/3Hyyl83 #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

How does the soundtrack of a movie change your memory of the story? New work led by @jayneuro.bsky.social finds that repeated musical motifs can reactivate neural patterns from earlier scenes, and reactivation is related to better subsequent memory!

Groundbreaking work by @martamasilva.bsky.social using intracranial recordings to study event boundaries and event memory, revealing neural mechanisms that we haven't been able to measure with fMRI!

My lab's research was featured on the public radio program The Academic Minute, who helped me put together a short summary of our recent work on shifting event boundaries in the brain! academicminute.org/christopher-...

🥳Excited to share that I am joining Columbia July 2025 @columbiauniversity.bsky.social Looking for🚨lab managers🚨postdocs🚨grad students! Pls REPOST🙏 We study⭐️person perception⭐️social cognition using experimental, cross-cultural, & computational methods! App👉shorturl.at/5UVPl More👉shorturl.at/q18GM

I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026! I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory! RT appreciated! (1/5)

What drives human curiosity? Is it a need to balance stimulation — or something we learn over time? In our 🚨 new preprint, we show that learning reinforces curiosity, especially for related content. osf.io/9bw6j_v2 w/ Jane Mok, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social , Caroline Marvin, Daphna Shohamy 🧵👇

New preprint 🎉: How do episodic memory, emotions, and schemas for caregiver experiences come together in kids’ brains and verbal recall? Check out our new results showing how past and present childhood experiences shape perception and memory for movies: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How does the brain respond to art? In a new @pnas.org study, by showing paintings to people while scanning their brains, Daphna Shohamy, Celia Durkin and colleagues provide a scientific test of a longstanding idea in art theory. Read: zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/art-brain-be... #neuroscience 🧠🎨

My favorite conference is the Memory Disorders Research Society meeting. It's a delightful community: top-notch research & wonderful people who have been so supportive in my career. Want to join? Nominations for membership (including self-nominations) are open until April 9! Form at the top👇🏼

For anyone at #CNS2025 - check out @xrmasiso.bsky.social's talk tomorrow afternoon, showing that we can use fMRI to predict which (VR) locations will be good anchors for creating *future* memories! www.cogneurosociety.org/talk/?id=5579

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thank you to Ingrid Wickelgren and the team at Quanta for putting together this great piece, describing work by my lab and others on the neural representations of events

After years of work designing and running this study with a multi-University team, we have our first preprint 🎉🎉 showing how a memorization technique builds neural representations through conjunctive representations! See thread and preprint link ⬇️

New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🔔𝐍𝐄𝐖 𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐓🔔 Beyond excited to present our new work showcasing 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐝! Wait what? Exciting collab w/ @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/11)

Gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation may be linked through a common process that reinstates past experiences during memory retrieval! doi.org/10.1101/2024... Check out our #Preprint that integrates eye tracking into the Sherlock fMRI Dataset! Postdoc work w/ @cibaker.bsky.social 🧠🟦 #PsychSciSky

How does our ability to anticipate future events change with time and experience? With memory consolidation, multistep anticipation becomes more efficient but less perceptually detailed. Proud of Hannah Tarder-Stoll for this work with me & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social! #PsychSciSky

Big year over here: -Earned tenure -Left tenured position for a job I love even more. -Won a CAREER award from the NSF. -First paper with undergraduate collaborator published in Open Mind. -Finished* Visual Experience Dataset -Published cool paper with @bjbalas.bsky.social. *waiting on co-authors

At NeurIPS this week, led by Caroline Lee in collab w/ Haxby lab: we present the Hyper-HMM, to simultaneously align participants' spatial brain patterns (like hyperalignment) and temporal dynamics (with event segmentation), and align brain events to stimulus features! www.dpmlab.org/papers/8510_...

New preprint led by @huangjiawen.bsky.social: we find that predictable stimuli are better remembered for two separate reasons: making correct predictions improves memory, and likely stimuli can be more easily reconstructed. We can independently manipulate these two factors! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Here are the slides of my talk on: "The role of Frontoparietal Attention Networks in conscious perception and voluntary imagination". I wanted to thank the organizers of the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Seminar @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social, Camille Gasser & Herb Terrace. t.co/z0ggWnu6BF

Nice news article on my paper w/ Tal Golan, Matt Siegelman, and Niko Kriegeskorte, describing a method for finding "weak spots" in language models and testing how well they can predict human judgments: bit.ly/3PAbI4w Full paper is out in Nature Machine Intelligence now! rdcu.be/dl91g #psychscisky