Akram Bakkour

@akrambakkour.bsky.social

Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. I study how we use memory to make better decisions.

☕️Shape the future of Open Research: Join the ReproducibiliTea Steering Committee for 2027! We are thrilled to announce that applications are officially open to join the ReproducibiliTea Steering Committee starting in early 2027.

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📣 We're hiring! The Saez Lab at Mount Sinai is seeking a postdoctoral researcher with experience in intracranial recordings, electrophysiology, BCIs, mood disorders, and/or computational modeling, to explore the neural basis of human cognition. 🗓️ Apply by September 30, 2026. Please share widely!

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Come work with me at Google! We have an open 6-month temp role on my team - it’s a great opportunity for someone with a cog neuro or psych background interested in exploring big tech. Looking for comp modeling experience (e.g. RL, DDMs) and Python/JS. Reach out to learn more or pass along any names!

A new paper shows that reward spreads across multiple links in memory and selectively preserves the structure of related items. In other words: reward doesn't just travel through memory, it shapes it to guide what you choose next.

Akram Bakkour@akrambakkour.bsky.social · 2mo ago

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social led by Seoyoung Lee! Does reward spread across multiple links in memory organized in a cognitive graph? Yes! We see graded spread through a recalled (even if incorrect) learned graph. Reward preserves proximal structure to support decisions.

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social led by Seoyoung Lee! Does reward spread across multiple links in memory organized in a cognitive graph? Yes! We see graded spread through a recalled (even if incorrect) learned graph. Reward preserves proximal structure to support decisions.

Reward selectively preserves relational structure in memory

Memories tend to form networks that reflect relationships between experiences. These networks, or cognitive graphs, have been used to study how struct…

authors.elsevier.com

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

Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).

How do people build new ideas from existing knowledge? By tracking Wikipedia searches, we found that novel ideas emerged when people balanced exploration with exploitation—alternating between distant topics and deep dives into related information.

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As of today, I'm officially an Assistant Professor at the University of California Davis! I'm so excited to be joining the Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain, and I'm looking forward to getting settled into the new lab and embarking on a lot of fun new research this year

A short blonde woman stands next to a concrete sign that says UC Davis. The background of the photos shows a view of a lawn, tree, and building on the UC Davis campus.

New preprint! We show low arousal states promote hippocampal ripple genesis in sleep and wake. This bridges rodent work, where ripples predominate during sleep, with human studies reporting ripples during active behavior, identifying low arousal as a common mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Arousal state modulates human hippocampal ripples

Hippocampal ripples are transient, high-frequency oscillations linked to memory replay and consolidation. Ripples are well-characterized in rodents to occur during periods of behavioral inactivity (i....

biorxiv.org

I've been told my discussion with NPR about US academics/scientists moving overseas will be on NPR later today on All Things Considered! Live broadcast 4-6pm Eastern. Don’t know when my segment will be within this, but tune in! Huge thanks to @npr.org for the opportunity to share my perspective.

It feels strange to share good news, but: I’m moving to UCSD in July!! 🥳 I'm very grateful for my time at Princeton and SO excited for what comes next. We're building multiplayer games to study how teams are shaped by the problems they solve. If that sounds fun to you, I'm accepting grad students!

Paragliders hover between the cliffs and sea in Torrey Pines Gliderport, La Jolla, CA, USA. Photo credit Micah Fluhart for Unsplash.