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!

Our paper is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com! By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we found that these rich and idiosyncratic thoughts can be decoded from brain network dynamics and help explain links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior.

Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com · 2w ago

Ongoing thoughts at rest reflect functional brain organization and behaviour

Sometimes we know an experience is important in the moment. Other times, its importance only becomes clear after the fact. Do these two cases have different consequences for memory? In our new paper we found that both kinds of prioritization impact memory in different ways! doi.org/10.1162/OPMI...

Prioritizing Detailed Item Memories Through Post-Encoding Motivation Requires Consolidation

Abstract. Prioritizing memories that are motivationally salient is adaptive for goal-directed behavior, ensuring that information being retained is the most relevant to future goals. Past research dem...

doi.org

There's been discussion about Prolific's dynamic pricing model here on bluesky. To learn more about this (and to make loads of cash, apparently!) I decided to become an actual Prolific participant. See thread below, but TLDR: What's happening on Prolific is not what I expected!👇

Brynn Sherman@brynnsherman.bsky.social · 4mo ago

After noticing another (significant!) drop in data quality this morning, I saw that Prolific is now recommending that participants be paid $48/hr

New paper linking mesolimbic-hippocampal circuits to childhood trauma and anhedonia with @laurenellman.bsky.social and led by Katey O’Brien. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Functional integrity of mesolimbic-hippocampal circuits is associated with anhedonia in individuals with early life stress

Anhedonia reflects a transdiagnostic deficit in a range of processes that impact reward and motivation. While human neuroimaging has mainly focused on striatal-related alterations in anhedonia, animal...

jneurosci.org

First foray into characterizing hippocampal-mesolimbic contributions to substance use. Props to awesome former post-doc Blake Elliott for steering the charge. A few more substance-use related papers are in the pipeline! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Hippocampus–Ventral Striatum Connectivity Is Associated With Binge Drinking Frequency in Adults

Contextual information, such as spatial locations and social groups, are known to propagate reward-seeking behavior including binge drinking. Animal models suggest that context-evoked drug and alcoho....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵

***New preprint from the lab*** showing “Generative replay across hippocampal-neocortical circuits”. In sleep we show spiking sequences in V1 (sensory neocortex!) that represent information that has not been directly experienced www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @bndu.ox.ac.uk @ndcnoxford.bsky.social

Generative replay across hippocampal-neocortical circuits

To make flexible decisions, the brain needs to make inferences between events that were not directly experienced together. In sharp-wave ripple (SWR) events, during periods of rest and sleep, spiking ...

biorxiv.org

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

Our paper is out in @natmachintell.nature.com! We trained multiple RNNs to perform free recall. The best-performing ones learned a strategy akin to the memory palace technique. See thread below for more info. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

A neural network model of free recall learns multiple memory strategies - Nature Machine Intelligence

Li et al. show that recurrent neural networks optimized for free recall discover diverse, human-like memory strategies beyond classical temporal context models, with top models using an index-based me...

nature.com

New paper out: Led by super grad student Jim Zhang and in collaboration with Greg Cogan, we review and synthesize Insights into the neural mechanisms supporting cognitive stability and flexibility from human intracranial electroencephalography. For free access: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nRYWY3M3p...

Interested in memory updating, exploration, structure learning, & reward? @hannahtarder-stoll.bsky.social & I are looking for candidates to apply for a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellowship at York University, with the opportunity to work at Rice too. Contact Hannah or me for details! #PsychJobs

How does stress change the hippocampus to prioritize predictions? Excited to be part of this terrific theme issue, sharing work led by @zhoui.bsky.social, continuing our collab w Nick Turk-Browne and @brynnsherman.bsky.social

Peter Kok@peterkok.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The papers in this theme issue use multiple methods to examine how hippocampal predictions link memory and perception across cognitive domains. Some focus on learning, others on generating and using predictions. We introduce the theme issue and individual papers here:

A video of a patient who responded well to personalized TMS: www.temasekreview.com.sg/community-st...

Thomas Yeo@bttyeo.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Our TMS algorithm is now published in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... If you are coming to @ohbmofficial.bsky.social @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social, come check out our poster about our open label trial. Poster number 1152 Monday, Jun 15 | 14:45-15:45 Tuesday, Jun 16 | 13:30-14:30

New lab paper ! "Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons" led by @xinyuanyan.bsky.social. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons

The human brain has the remarkable ability to comprehend and express similar concepts in multiple languages. To understand how it does so, we examined…

sciencedirect.com

The massive 7T-fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) has been extended to Neuropixels recordings in macaques! Exciting resource for inter-species comparisons by Li et al. @natneuro.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Also nice News & Views by Kay and colleagues! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Paper is now out in Nature Comms doi.org/10.1038/s414... If you are at @ohbmofficial.bsky.social @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social , come check out our poster about Simpson’s paradox in neurodevelopment. Poster number 998 Monday, June 15 | 14:45-15:45 Tuesday, June 16 | 13:30-14:30

@yapeixie.bsky.social · last yr.

Our new preprint is out! doi.org/10.1101/2025... How do brain networks and cognition co-evolve as children enter adolescence?

We've known that socioeconomics (SES) matters for the 🧠. New & 🤯 is that SES drowns out all other brain associations, incl. IQ. If you train an algorithm to predict IQ from brain data, it's still way better at predicting SES. Science Mag: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @smarek0502.bsky.social 👀🧵👇

Scott Marek@smarek0502.bsky.social · 3mo ago

What matters most for childhood brain organization? We analyzed 649 variables. The answer: Socioeconomics (SES); with brain patterns pointing at sleep & stress as drivers. Even brain-IQ associations were better explained by SES. In Science today: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry - Nature Neuroscience

Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...

nature.com

✨ VERY excited to share our new paper led by Holly Bowen (SMU) & former ugrad Kyle Thurmann "Effects of reward anticipation on memory encoding and cognitive control outcomes: A meta-analysis" finally in press @ Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 💵🧠 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thread 1/n

Effects of reward anticipation on memory encoding and cognitive control outcomes: A meta-analysis

Extensive evidence suggests that cognitive performance is typically enhanced under increased motivation, often in the form of reward anticipation. Whi…

sciencedirect.com

🎉New paper out today in Nature Reviews Psychology🎉 with @mjdahl.bsky.social, @mariamaly.bsky.social, and @thiasmittner.bsky.social. We've been working on a unified framework for attentional states and the dynamics of transitions between them. 🧵

Excited to share our new review in Trends in Neuroscience with Gouki Okazawa @gouki-okazawa.bsky.social : "The 'neat' and 'messy' in task-dependent neural geometry and computation" where we reviewed what we know about the 'task-manager' in the brain. A thread 👇

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵

Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand - Nature Neuroscience

By combining magnetoencephalography and eye tracking, this study sheds light on why people fixate on some parts of natural scenes longer than others. Rather than visual complexity, fixation durations ...

nature.com

Perceptual and conceptual influences on memory judgments New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com by the prolific @rmt93.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44... We tested predictions of the global matching model to quantify the interference associated with perceptual or conceptual lure similarity

Here's bonus slides on cross-validation tests, separate from our preprint. Covering: 1. paired (sign-flip) permutation test 2. label-swap permutation test 3. sample-level vs fold-averaged stats 4. a common misapplication of the corrected t-test 5. three bootstrap variants 1/N

Thomas Yeo@bttyeo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

In a meta-analysis of 210 biomedical AI studies that statistically compared models under cross-validation, 97% used invalid statistical tests. Here's our new preprint doi.org/10.64898/202... led by @tianchu.bsky.social @hetuli.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social @nichols.bsky.social 1/N

New preprint as my first post! "Monosynaptic connections link functionally similar regions in human cortex." We use electrical stimulation + fMRI in epilepsy patients to map whole-brain monosynaptic connectivity at 42 cortical sites. doi.org/10.64898/202... 1/n

In a meta-analysis of 210 biomedical AI studies that statistically compared models under cross-validation, 97% used invalid statistical tests. Here's our new preprint doi.org/10.64898/202... led by @tianchu.bsky.social @hetuli.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social @nichols.bsky.social 1/N

New paper from the lab. Using longitudinal ca imaging, activity-dependent tagging and optogenetics, we show that newly allocated fear engram neurons in amygdala undergo a brief period of coordinated “offline reverberation” immediately after learning. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Do brain circuits really sit in a 'soup' of neuromodulators? Are neurons like soggy bits of bread soaked in signaling factors? Is the whole brain just squelching around in one big pool of warm modulators?

Can you make your life feel “longer” in retrospect? Add a dose of change and novelty in the present to later expand memories of your past. Excited to share our work on how dopamine-related processing bends memory to reflect the passage of distinct events. newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/can...