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...

Volume 381 Issue 1954 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | The Royal Society

Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

royalsocietypublishing.org

Mariam Aly@mariamaly.bsky.social · 4w ago

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes? The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions. New work w/ @hannahtarder-stoll.bsky.social & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social – part of the theme issue on hippocampal predictions!

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...

Binding items to contexts through conjunctive neural representations with the method of loci - Nature Communications

This study of a mnemonic technique found that highly effective memory is supported by “conjunctive” representations in the brain’s Default Mode Network, which reflects the unique, creative details use...

doi.org

Jiawen Huang@huangjiawen.bsky.social · 2y ago

New preprint with Akshay Manglik, Nick Dutra, Hannah Tarder-Stoll, @tchamberlain.bsky.social, Robert Ajemian, @qiongzhang.bsky.social, @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social looking at conjunctive representation during Method of Loci! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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

Mariam Aly@mariamaly.bsky.social · 4mo ago

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!

👋 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 🧵👇

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...

MDRS

MDRS is a professional society dedicated to the study of memory. Members engage in basic and clinical research into how memory works and why it fails.

memorydisorders.org

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-...

The Places We Make Memories Help Us Inscribe Them

Psychology researchers used virtual reality and MRI technology to better understand how locations help us encode memories.

news.columbia.edu

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

Rolando Masís-Obando@xrmasiso.bsky.social · 7mo ago

What if we could tell you how well you’ll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? ☕️ In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 can be measured with neuroimaging – and 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸.

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!

Mariam Aly@mariamaly.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Excited to release the SPOT grid: a new image set that factorially crosses scene-object & texture-pattern pairings. We hope these stimuli will be useful to researchers aiming to (partially) disentangle the contributions of lower- and higher-level visual features to behavior & brain activity. 1/

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 !

Mariam Aly@mariamaly.bsky.social · 11mo ago

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes? The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions. Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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!

Mariam Aly@mariamaly.bsky.social · 11mo ago

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall. Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

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!

Matthias Nau@matthiasnau.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory! We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵1/9

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

Halle Dimsdale-Zucker@halledz.bsky.social · 12mo ago

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

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

Aging and false memories: Comparing effects of item-relatedness and list position

Semantic false memories are traditionally more frequent from early list positions and thought to arise from presumed long-term memory stores whereas phonological false memories traditionally are more ...

bit.ly

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!

Jamal A. Williams@jayneuro.bsky.social · last yr.

Music is an incredibly powerful retrieval cue. What is the neural basis of music-evoked memory reactivation? And how does this reactivation relate to later memory for the retrieved events? In our new study, we used Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to find out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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!

Marta Silva@martamasilva.bsky.social · last yr.

🧠 Paper out! We investigated how hippocampal and cortical ripples support memory during movie watching. We found that: 🎬 Hippocampal ripples mark event boundaries 🧩 Cortical ripples predict later recall Ripples may help transform real-life experiences into lasting memories! rdcu.be/eui9l

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-...

Christopher Baldassano, Columbia University - The Brain Organizes Narratives Into Meaningful Event Memories - The Academic Minute

How we experience an event may change how we remember it. Christopher Baldassano, associate professor of psychology at Columbia University, looks into our past experiences for clues. Christopher Balda...

academicminute.org

🥳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...

Past and present caregiving experiences impact prefrontal connectivity and recall for attachment-schema narratives

We investigated how past and current caregiving experiences impacted emotional event processing by examining inter-subject functional correlation in 7- to 15-year-olds during narrative movies depictin...

biorxiv.org

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👇🏼

MDRS

MDRS is a professional society dedicated to the study of memory. Members engage in basic and clinical research into how memory works and why it fails.

memorydisorders.org

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

Symposium Talk - Cognitive Neuroscience Society

March 29-April 1  |  2025 Submit a Symposium Submit a Poster Latest from Twitter

cogneurosociety.org

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/...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants

Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

science.org

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

Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · last yr.

New neuroscience research is en route to unlocking a universal human code for recording experiences as memory. What’s their secret weapon? Airport scenes in movies. www.quantamagazine.org/how-event-sc...

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 ⬇️

Jiawen Huang@huangjiawen.bsky.social · 2y ago

New preprint with Akshay Manglik, Nick Dutra, Hannah Tarder-Stoll, @tchamberlain.bsky.social, Robert Ajemian, @qiongzhang.bsky.social, @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social looking at conjunctive representation during Method of Loci! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...