🧠🚨 How can we measure the latent cognitive processes that work together during complex behavior? In our new Perspective, we propose cross-domain transfer: learning a neural signature of a cognitive process in one task and using it to track that process in another. 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

(1/9) Preprint Alert! 🚨 New work on how the brain comprehends narratives. 🧠🎥 Are "Key Moments" - our recent line of research - truly distinct from "Event Boundaries"? We put them to the test to see if these two constructs differ from each other. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Come and join our replication initiative in visual neuroscience! Low bar for entry, ideal for anyone from a Master’s student looking for a thesis to faculty who want to get back to the bench. 🤓 re-vision-initiative.org

re:vision | Replication Initiative for Visual Neuroscience

Test whether published visual-neuroscience findings (NSD, THINGS, etc.) generalize to broadly-sampled natural images using the LAION-fMRI (LfMRI) 7T dataset.

re-vision-initiative.org

@re-vision-init.bsky.social · 2w ago

(1/6) Do our visual neuroscience findings actually replicate? And do they generalize beyond the datasets they were found in? We've lauched re:vision, a community-driven initiative to answer these questions, and we are looking for scientistis to participate. re-vision-initiative.org

Excited to share that my first-ever first-author paper (w/ @atabk.bsky.social @AngeliqueDelarazan @zreagh.bsky.social) is now out in PNAS! Building a story to link two objects boosts associative memory and inference, but not memory for the objects themselves. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Active linking through narratives facilitates associative inference | PNAS

In daily life, we often draw inferences about novel associations from prior experiences. This ability, associative inference, is thought to be a ke...

pnas.org

calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!

Happy to announce this work has been published www.nature.com/articles/s44... People can view the same event and recall it differently. Here we asked if two participants recall events similarly, where in the brain do they share event representations both at encoding and recall?

Alex Barnett@alexbarnett.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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...

The Naturalistic Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab is launching at UT Austin and is looking for founding members at all levels, including lab manager, PhD students, and postdocs! #NeuroJobs We will study human brain🧠 and memory & attention, using fMRI and modeling. thesonglab.github.io

🎊New Lab Alert! I'll be starting at the 🧡University of Texas at Austin🧡 this August! More info to come. thesonglab.github.io I send my deep gratitude to my mentors, Monica @monicarosenb.bsky.social, YC @ycleong.bsky.social, ShiNung @shinung.bsky.social & Zach @zreagh.bsky.social, for everything.

New preprint from Ashwin Srinivasan! TL;DR: Giving people control over transitions in a TikTok-like interface improved subsequent memory; predictability of transitions did not. Segmentation and control: Control over transitions differentially impacts within-event memory osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 I’m excited to share the first paper from my postdoc. We found age differences in the timescales of neural activity in the hippocampus during movie viewing 👀 These timescales were related to memory specificity in an interesting way (spoiler: the hippocampus may not be special!?)

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Age Differences in Hippocampal Neural Timescales During Movie-Viewing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.05.723065v1

Our first foray into horror movies was recently published. Former grad student David Gregory used them as a means to study temporal memory for threatening events. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41965942/

Arousal and valence differentially shape temporal memory for naturalistic events - PubMed

While emotional arousal and negative valence both alter episodic memory, their contributions to different facets of temporal memory remain unclear. Here, we examined two components of temporal memory ...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Nice study looking at memory cuing when recalling information about a movie (Sherlock - obvs). Within-event cuing little better than between-event cuing. In fact, gist recall is better following a cue from the preceding event which may help "maintain contiguity". www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

Frontiers | Separating the details while maintaining the story: within event episodic integration and across event semantic contiguity in memory

The within > across effect refers to improved memory for information cued from within the same event compared to across events. Although this effect has been...

frontiersin.org

Congratulations to @jadynpark.bsky.social and colleagues for winning the #SANS2026 Innovation Award for their paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/

#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...

Do you censor high motion frames in fMRI? In two preprints by @twktan.bsky.social @mandymejia.bsky.social, we find that we may be censoring too much! doi.org/10.64898/202... arxiv.org/html/2603.07... Strict censoring leads to worse personalized TMS targets than no censoring, even with high motion!

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as events become familiar. Slow-timescale structure predicts memory. Excited to share this work w/ Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

Repeated Viewing of a Film Clip Changes Event Timescales in The Brain

Many everyday experiences share a recurring structure: routines, familiar routes, rewatched films, and replayed songs. How do repeated encounters with such structure alter the brain’s representations ...

jneurosci.org

Attention fluctuates over time and across contexts—how is this reflected in the brain?🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we show that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects changes in attention. Out in @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So excited about this preprint: Bottom-up and generative computations uniquely explain neural responses across the social brain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... An amazing colab led by @manasimalik.bsky.social with Minjae Kim, @tianminshu.bsky.social and @shariliu.bsky.social Manasi's thread 👇

Manasi Malik@manasimalik.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Excited to share new work on how the brain makes social inferences from visual input! 🧠👯‍♂️ (With @lisik.bsky.social , @shariliu.bsky.social, @tianminshu.bsky.social , and Minjae Kim!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Please circulate widely! Open positions at the Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) sites.google.com/site/visionl... How to Apply: forms.gle/vWa1PwUrcpWf... Deadline : March 31 2026

Stop by Poster E73 tomorrow to learn about: 🧠 an LLM pipeline for automated recall scoring, and 📖 how we (@atabk.bsky.social @nicholebouffard.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social) use it to understand whether compressed memories can be unfolded to recover details #CNS2026

if you’re at #CNS2026 and are interested in key moments and what they do for narrative comprehension and memory, come check out our poster(w/ @zreagh.bsky.social) tomorrow from 2:30-4:30 PM (E78).

draft lab ai policy, feel free to use, modify, or discuss! todd.gureckislab.org/2026/03/06/g...

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one? In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

My poster F105 — The Influence of Event Boundaries on Working Memory Updating — answer this question. 300+ participants, two paradigms, and results that flip the our a prior prediction. 📍 Tue March 10, 8–10am | Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms #CNS2026 2/3 @cogneuronews.bsky.social

the human hippocampus receives convergent input from multiple sensory systems, yet we lack a basic understanding of how this structure integrates across senses. we tackle this problem in our new preprint! paper: doi.org/10.64898/202... w/ Aryan Agarwal, @yannanzhu.bsky.social, & Nick Turk-Browne

Excited to share our paper (with @jzacks.bsky.social), now out in JEP:LMC! Event boundaries sometimes disrupt temporal order memory in list-based paradigms—but what happens in narratives with more complex structures that better resemble real life? ✨ Link: psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

1/ 🚨 New preprint Key Moments Scaffold the Semantic Structure of Narratives Using spoken recall and annotations from three naturalistic datasets with topic modeling, we ask: which parts of a narrative contribute most to its semantic structure and subsequently memory? Preprint: osf.io/dcfvw

My new book is available open access from MITPress. It's a pretty new take on syntax, with some cool consequences for long-distance syntactic dependencies, and I think it should also appeal to non-minimalist syntacticians (since there isn't really any movement!) direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

Mereological Syntax: Phrase Structure, Cyclicity, and Islands

An argument for replacing Chomsky’s set-theoretic Merge view of syntax with a theory of syntax based on mereological objects.Mereology is the study of part

direct.mit.edu

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.