www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus 👀👀 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience

Thompson, Rollik and colleagues show that, during sleep, the brain replays procedural memories in the striatum independently of the hippocampus. Replay content was shaped by prior reward and error out...

nature.com

1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found:

New from me and Alan Leslie! We got the band back together to lay out our view on object representations in the infant mind: non-discursive indexes that operate within a language of thought, & which get development of a more complex object concept off the ground www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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

Baseline pupil size ↑↑ baseline LC activity Baseline-subtracted evoked pupil response ↑↑ baseline-subtracted evoked LC response Baseline LC activity ↑↓ evoked LC activity Then: baseline-subtracted evoked pupil responses ↑↓ baseline LC activity? No! This paper tested and failed to find. Nice study!👏

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Limitations of pupil diameter as a proxy for modes of locus coeruleus activity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.14.738598v1

A neural network model of free recall learns multiple memory strategies 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

Very happy to see one of my PhD projects out there, and fully open access! 🚄🧠 We took cognitive science outside the lab to study how passengers estimate time, distance, and speed during a Paris–Lyon high-speed train journey. doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

A Journey Into a Traveler's Mental Map: Duration, Distance, and Speed Experienced in High‐Speed Trains

Our study investigates how high-speed transport affects humans’ perception of time, space, and speed. We tested 247 passengers traveling on the French Paris-Lyon high-speed train (TGV) who estimated ...

doi.org

calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!

Thrilled to share our new #preprint, and super proud of @zednud.bsky.social and our work on eye–brain dynamics during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Also excited to share that Zach started his PhD with me recently! 🎉 Lots of ideas and cool work ahead. Follow him on Bluesky and check out his thread! 🧵

Zach Nudelman@zednud.bsky.social · 3w ago

Excited to share my first #preprint with @matthiasnau.bsky.social on how gaze behavior shapes brain activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Gaze-dependent activity was widespread even during sleep, including in many visual cortices, and altered brain-wide functional connectivity! 🧵 1/8

1/ I am thrilled to begin sharing the latest release of pyEM, a Python package I built for fitting cognitive computational models to behavioral data using hierarchical expectation maximization (EM) with maximum a posteriori estimation (MAP). github.com/shawnrhoads/...

New paper alert from our lab! nature.com/articles/s41... We used stimuli sequences following 1/f statistical patterns—an ubiquitous statistical structure in natural stimuli—to probe predictive processing in the human brain. How does the brain predict upcoming sensory inputs based on past inputs?

My fMRI study from the Mack Lab (@drmack.bsky.social) is now published on JNeuro! Here, we look into how hippocampal subfields flexibly update category knowledge representations in the face of novel exceptions. Check out the article here: doi.org/10.1523/JNEU....

Distinct Hippocampal Subfield Representational Shifts Underlie Category Exception Learning

When we encounter an exception to our prior category knowledge, such as a leaf-like butterfly that perceptually diverges from the butterflies we commonly see, we must update our knowledge to reconcile...

doi.org

The hippocampus sits at the interface of perception & memory, allowing us to link past, present, & future through its role in generating predictions. Excited to share this theme issue in @royalsociety.org's Philosophical Transactions B, co-edited with @barense.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social

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

Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

royalsocietypublishing.org

This is one of my favourite things. Direct replication of MEG and fMRI findings in intracranial recordings and a demonstration that cortical representations update in the right direction around hippocampal ripples.

Blake Richards@tyrellturing.bsky.social · 4w ago

For a long time I felt like there was a hesitation in neuroscience to ascribe anything like a planning function to the various "replay" events we see in the hippocampus, but I think this is rapidly changing. Here's another new entry in human epilepsy patients: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪

Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.

Neural timescales from a computational perspective - Nature Neuroscience

This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...

nature.com

New open dataset out in Scientific Data 🚨 We are releasing BBBD: the Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Work with @parralab.org

The Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset (BBBD): Multimodal Recordings during Educational Videos - Scientific Data

Scientific Data - The Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset (BBBD): Multimodal Recordings during Educational Videos

nature.com

How do we remember when an event occurred? In work with @virginievanw.bsky.social and @grassocamille.bsky.social we employed a novel virtual reality environment to present segmented sequences of images. The spatial structure of the environment had a dramatic effect on the remembering of 'when'.

Matthew Logie@matthewrlogie.bsky.social · last mo.

An update for "Nested contextual change and the temporal compression of memory". www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We establish a foundation for incorporating theoretical accounts of segmented temporal context drift and central tendency effects of timing.

An exciting MEG+pupillometry study by @quiringehmacher.bsky.social demonstrating coordination between mechanisms mediating perception and learning. Sensory cortex tracks prediction error continuously in a graded manner, while the brainstem only responds once crossing a threshold. Excellent summary👇

Quirin Gehmacher@quiringehmacher.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New preprint w/ @akalt.bsky.social, Juliane Schubert, Nathan Weisz, & @clarepress.bsky.social 🎉 Predictive-brain accounts treat "prediction error" as one signal. We find it's two jobs, in two dissociable systems. And one of them you can watch in the pupil, as people listen to a story. 🧵 (1/9)

Does signed prediction error influence declarative memory? This recent study takes a closer look - replicating prior findings, but uncovering an alternative explanation along the way! Doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01864-8

1/ LLMs learn narrative from their pretraining data but what narrative content is actually in there? It turns out narrative is wildly unevenly distributed across sources and topics. New preprint with @andrewpiper.bsky.social @elliottash.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social:

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...

How do other animals experience time? It's been a pleasure to work with @singhal.bsky.social and @anilseth.bsky.social on a paper exploring how temporal illusions and other experimental strategies can shed light on this. It's our today! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Very excited to share this paper, led by @ajhaskins.bsky.social ! We find that how people look around the world is stable and idiosyncratic — and that these gaze patterns are shaped in part by the conceptual priorities each person brings to a scene. 1/3 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is one of the most socially important scientific findings I've ever been a part of. SES has a larger cross-sectional effect on brain function than any other variable. Prediction of IQ from brain data is actually mostly just predicting SES. Mind blowing.

Scott Marek@smarek0502.bsky.social · 2mo 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/...

Interested in human replay and solid methods? Jointly with @skjerns.de we're releasing a benchmark dataset with known ground-truth neural sequences in MEG & fMRI, for developing & validating replay methods. First test: existing methods show similar effect sizes, but room to improve shorturl.at/6TgIr

FASTIMAGES: Validating replay detection methods in human neuroimaging using a combined MEG and fMRI dataset

Studies in rodents and humans using invasive electrophysiology have established that neural replay is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the brain that is associated with a wide range of cognitive functions, ...

shorturl.at

The Naturalistic Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab is launching at UT Austin and is looking for founding members at all levels, including lab manager, PhD students, and postdocs! #NeuroJobs We will study human brain🧠 and memory & attention, using fMRI and modeling. thesonglab.github.io

New preprint from Tan Nguyen! Ever wanted to know why violating a schema sometimes helps memory but sometimes hurts? osf.io/preprints/ps...

Happy to announce this work has been published www.nature.com/articles/s44... People can view the same event and recall it differently. Here we asked if two participants recall events similarly, where in the brain do they share event representations both at encoding and recall?

Alex Barnett@alexbarnett.bsky.social · 11mo ago

New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New perspective piece with @mandanas.bsky.social: We argue, based on LLMs and old connectionist theories, that schemas shouldn't be viewed as distinct from semantic or episodic memories. They're just one end of a detailed-to-abstract memory spectrum: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪

The schema spectrum: Emergent structures and levels of abstraction in AI and the brain

Motivated by generative AI, Samiei et al. argue against classical models that treat schemas as distinct memory structures. Instead, they propose that schemas are merely a conceptual tool describing ho...

cell.com