Aya Ben-Yakov

@ayab.bsky.social

How do we prevent memories from competing to guide attention? More distinct hippocampal representations for competing memories are linked to precise preparatory coding in visual cortex & more accurate eye movements to target locations. Thrilled to share this work by the incomparable Serra Favila!

Hippocampal mechanisms underlying the resolution of competition in memory and perception - Nature Communications

Memory and perception both require selecting behaviorally relevant information. Here, the authors show that more distinct hippocampal memories are linked to precise anticipatory signals in visual cort...

nature.com

Check out Adi’s new paper! In our Key Moments Adventures, we previously found they’re kinda-sorta correlated with event boundaries. We wanted to know just how kinda-sorta, and importantly, we went to great lengths to equate the way the two constructs were measured. Read on 😎

Adi Upadhyayula@adibuoy23.bsky.social · 2mo ago

(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...

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

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

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

Super thrilled to finally share the results of our team effort, from the lab of the one and only @ayab.bsky.social. Hopefully it will stir interesting discussions about how the brain balances continuity and segmentation

Aya Ben-Yakov@ayab.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum @erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

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!

Repeated Viewing of a Narrative Movie Changes Event Timescales in The Brain

Many experiences occur repeatedly throughout our lives: we might watch the same movie more than once and listen to the same song on repeat. How does the brain modify its representations of events when...

biorxiv.org

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 · last yr.

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...

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

Communications Psychology@commspsychol.nature.com · last yr.

This study examines how events structured recall, which was impaired for items after event boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showed that decision certainty predicts recall success. @atabk.bsky.social @wouterkool.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

The craziest/loveliest part of departing from @ayab.bsky.social 's lab was this jaw dropping clip they made with KlingAI and a *single* photo of me. I guess this is what you get when you mess with masters of naturalistic stimuli 😱 Such a great gift and now the rest of the world can easily extort me