1/ How do we sustain mental continuity in the face of interruption? @xianl-explorer.bsky.social found that, while people listen to a story, posterior medial cortex expresses a slowly evolving "background" representation of the story's context, which survived through silence and interfering tasks.
How do keep a narrative active in our mind despite interruptions? The default mode network can maintain a representation of an interrupted story over a delay, even when the delay is filled with a demanding task. This representation is strikingly transformed from the initial experience!
Cortical and Hippocampal Pathways to Mental Continuity
How do people preserve mental continuity when tasks are interrupted? One established pathway runs through the hippocampus, which stores snapshots of our mental context for later reinstatement. We prop...
biorxiv.org
#Agenda #PhD #Research @xianl-explorer.bsky.social 's #Poster #Presentation 6 August 2026, 10:30-12:15 Kimmel Center, Shorin&Rosenthal Rooms at #CCN2026
In New York for #CCN2026! I’ll be presenting a poster on human-LLM alignment in narrative causal reasoning. If you’re interested in memory, narratives, AI, cognitive neuroscience, or just want to chat about research, postdocs, life, or exploring NYC, come say hi. Always happy to meet new people!
Planning to start talking with potential postdoc candidates by the end of this week. The position is very open in terms of topic area. Let me know ASAP if you might be interested!
aaron bornstein@aaronbornstein.bsky.social · 4mo agoLooking 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).
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
New work on agency and memory by @xianl-explorer.bsky.social, Janice Chen, myself and others! Using choose-your-own-adventures, we found that agency doesn’t always improve memory. Instead, agency personalized memory ❄️ ❄️ — even when people read the same text. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
