Sharing the latest from the lab. Led by Yunlong Liu, this work explores how microglia and engram neurons interact during fear extinction in the hippocampus. rdcu.be/fgNH7

Microglia-dependent regulation of fear memory extinction

Nature Neuroscience - Liu et al. show in mice that microglia are recruited to the soma and dendritic processes of fear engram neurons during extinction learning and that they weaken fear memories...

rdcu.be

We have a new preprint which characterizes characterizes two arteries that form the major blood supply to the hippocampus using in vivo Time-of-Flight (TOF) MR angiography 3T on 7T and . 🍤. We used compressed sensing to substantially reduce scan time and compare vessel diameter estimates and CNR.

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Characterization and Validation of Compressed Sensing for Time-of-Flight MRI Angiography of the Human Brain at 3T and 7T https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.22.720171v1

👋 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 🙏

Learning reinforces curiosity for related information | PNAS

Human curiosity is dynamic, however the principles governing its fluctuations remain debated. Here, we test two competing hypotheses about how past...

pnas.org

Yaniv Abir@yanivabir.bsky.social · last yr.

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 🧵👇

Exciting news for ICOM7 (International Conference on Memory), in Glasgow, 26th-30th July 2027. The conference website is live and we can announce our keynote speakers!

New paper from our group out in @pnas.org! doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... Big thank you to coauthors @vosstacular.bsky.social and @anikka-jordan.bsky.social. Anikka spearheaded this project during her time as an RA and is now a grad student at Yale.

Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient | PNAS

The hippocampus supports episodic memory by binding spatial and semantic information, yet how this information is simultaneously organized along it...

doi.org

Saturday was a good day for a fun chat about dreams and stuff with Katherine Bell on her podcast "the Dream Journal" (on ksqd.org/the-dream-jo...) - www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ4H...

Inside the Sleeping Mind: Memory, Dream Yoga, & the Neuroscience of Sleep with Ken Paller, PhD

YouTube video by Experiential Dreamwork

youtube.com

Curious what a representation of "everything" you know might look like? Wonder how you might fill it in? Check out our demo and paper (led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social and now out in @natcomms.nature.com ), or read on to learn more! Demo: context-lab.com/mapper/ Paper: www.doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Knowledge Mapper

An interactive tool that maps out everything you know. Answer questions and watch your personalized knowledge map take shape.

context-lab.com

For more than a century, the study of brain lesions has been central to understanding cognitive processes and normal brain function (e.g., Broca’s studies). However, what electrophysiological signatures emerge following a brain lesion?

The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at NIH is hosting a two-day symposium on 'Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience' in honor of Dr. Alex Martin, to be held at NIH (with online videocast) on April 7th-8th, 2026. Register to attend online or in-person at: bit.ly/4bYlbxw

Happy to share some of the work done in our lab in this mega-thread of nine (!) papers/preprints (+1 sneak peek) from the last six months. Here goes (in no particular order)! **Please repost** and let me know if you need access to any of the PDFs! #sleeppeeps #sleep #neuroscience 1/12

We have a new preprint examining single neuron responses in humans undergoing TMS (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...). The excellent Charlie Dickey led the way, and I had the privilege to co-supervise this work with @coreykeller.bsky.social and @aaronboes.bsky.social 🧵 (1/7) 🧠🟦 🧠💻

Hi Colleagues who use eyetracking! 👋 👀 @shen4brains.bsky.social , @jordwynn.bsky.social, Zhong Xu Liu and I are guest editing a Special Issue for Neuropsychologia on Contributions of eyetracking to cognitive neuroscience.

The deadline for CSBBCS abstracts has been extended to March 25: www.csbbcs.org/meetings/202... We already received a record # symposium submissions! @yorku-cian.bsky.social @erezfreud.bsky.social @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social @action-brain.bsky.social @canacn.bsky.social

CNS abstracts will soon post in the Proceedings of the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Soc., hosted as a dedicated partition of @jocnforum.bsky.social , and authors can then append their posters (or graphical abstract) as a “reply” to the abstract. E.g.s already viewable at …

This is a great point. Attendance for CNS in Vancouver was down, owing to stresses like this. Science slows when we don't keep abreast of new tools and findings. I encourage everyone presenting to post your posters online (blusky, lab websites, whatev) so we can keep our sense of community going!

Mark Histed@markhisted.org · 5mo ago

There are other ways that scientists who would have attended Cosyne have been blocked: wars, and other actions of autocratic regimes, from anti-talent immigration policy to attacking and defunding universities. We should be sympathetic to everyone who wants freedom who is being held back./end

I think Fodor & Pylyshyn's 1988 paper is possibly the most mischaracterized paper in the history of cognitive science. It's often cited as arguing that neural networks cannot achieve systematicity, compositionality, and productivity. But that's not what they actually argue...

How does the brain build a memory? A common assumption is that the neurons activated during an experience collectively form the memory engram. In our new Nature Neuroscience paper (finally out!), we show that this is not the case. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Deconstruction of a memory engram reveals distinct ensembles recruited at learning - Nature Neuroscience

Pouget et al. identified distinct CA1 neuron ensembles active during specific moments of fear learning and uncovered the core engram essential for memory formation.

nature.com

New review from our group out in Nature Reviews Psychology: Determinants of individual navigation ability with my excellent co-author: @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social

Nature Reviews Psychology@natrevpsychol.nature.com · 5mo ago

Determinants of individual navigation ability Review by Emre Yavuz & Hugo J. Spiers go.nature.com/4sHHH3A

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 interested in aging, schemas and episodic memory, check out Sophie O'Reilly's poster tomorrow 8-10am (D71)

If you're at #CNS2026 and interested in aging & memory, come see @emilyedavis.bsky.social's poster on implicit associative memory tomorrow at 8am (#63)

If you are at #CNS2026 and are interested in hierarchical structures in event segmentation and "neural state segmentation," come and chat with me at poster A111 this afternoon from 3-5pm :) Poster Session A #111: "Neural State Segmentation in Naturalistic Goal-directed Activities" 🧠🎞️

Come see our posters #CNS2026. All three are on session D Monday morning. Fantastic works from Xuan Zhang with @brianlevine.bsky.social, Dr. Erik Wing with @drjenryan.bsky.social and Dr. Lei Zhang with Dr. Claude Alain.

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper from our team led by the incredibly talented Dr. Erik Wing (with Jordan Chad, Geneva Mariotti and @drjenryan.bsky.social). www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

The tuned cortex: Convergent expertise-related structural and functional remodeling across the adult lifespan

Neuroplasticity is a defining property of the brain. Structural and functional brain changes arise soon after learning and are particularly evident following years of practice that underpin expert per...

jneurosci.org

Registration and poster abstract submission now open for the @yorku-cian.bsky.social symposium on 'Cognition & Action', June 4,5 following CSBBCS, with a mix of speaker topics on philosophy, behaviour, neuroimaging, and neurophysiology. See: www.yorku.ca/research/cia...

Save the date for ICOM-7 (aka the Memory Olympics)

(1/5) 🧵Our new preprint shows how the brain develops to transform how kids, teens & adults represent & navigate their world: shifting from local, moment-to-moment memories in childhood to integrated, global cognitive maps in adulthood 🧠 Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Using brain lesions and DNN models, this article suggests that human visual perception is modulated by language.

Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception - Nature Human Behaviour

Vision–language deep neural network models better explain human visual cortex activity than vision-only models. Damaging brain connections between visual and language areas reverses this pattern, suggesting that human visual perception is modulated by language.

nature.com