New preprint!

Prefrontal brain-to-brain synchrony during human group hunting: Evidence from fNIRS hyperscanning

Heroic work from @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social and team

fNIRS & minecraft combined to reveal PFC synchrony during human group hunting

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides:
gershmanlab.com/lectures.html
I'll continue to update these as I improve them.

We’ve got an exciting new thing to share! We have causal evidence (using TMR) that memory reactivation during sleep promotes abstract understanding of underlying structure, allowing transfer learning in a new domain with zero superficial feature overlap with the learned one.

Super excited to share this preprint! How do we disentangle underlying structure from the particular features of a learning episode to benefit future learning? We find that memory reactivation during sleep promotes this structure abstraction process.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Uncovering the embodied dimension of the wandering mind | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We dedicate this paper to Jonny Smallwood (1975-2025), who was instrumental in this project from inception to submission.

Jonny thank you for your mentorship & you are dearly missed!

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 ...

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!

🚨NEW PREPRINT (w/ Fleming Peck & Hongjing Lu)

"Spontaneous emergence of context-dependent statistical learning in humans and neural networks"

We are constantly predicting what will happen next. Yet the same cue can lead to different predictions depending on context.

How might this work...? 🧵1/8

Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Appeals to representation are widespread, despite neuroscientists’ uncertainty about what kind of findings count as evidence for such claims. In this Perspective, Pohl and colleagues develop a unified...

Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience — a Perspective by Stephan Pohl, Edgar Y. Walker, David L. Barack, Jennifer Lee, Rachel N. Denison, Ned Block, Florent Meyniel & Wei Ji Ma

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

Thanks! The protocol + checking with friends/relatives minimise confabulation. Hippocampal CA2/3 stitches the local structure of personal memories; when damaged, the loss of “narrative glue” explains lifespan memory detail loss. Narrative coherence could be a biomarker for hippocampal disorders.

📄 We introduce a computational-linguistic framework to probe memory in 32
individuals with hippocampal amnesia. CA2/3 sustains lifespan episodic memory, with CA1 only supporting recent remembering. Local (not global) narrative coherence mediates episodic detail loss. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Why the Brain Consolidates: Predictive Forgetting for Optimal Generalisation Standard accounts of memory consolidation emphasise the stabilisation of stored representations, but struggle to explain representational drift, semanticisation, or the necessity of offline replay. He...

Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL:
arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688
They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.

I’m proud of much in our lab, but this study is mind-blowing 🌟📣📣📣🚀

Hi Colleagues who use eyetracking! 👋 👀

@shen4brains.bsky.social , @jordwynn.bsky.social, Zhong Xu Liu and I are guest editing a Special Issue for Neuropsychologia on Contributions of eyetracking to cognitive neuroscience.

New lab preprint!

Human Navigation Behaviour and Brain Dynamics in Real-world Contexts

with co-authors: @pfvelasco.bsky.social and @antoinecoutrot.bsky.social

arxiv.org/pdf/2603.11347

New lab paper! 🧠

Human hippocampal & MTL theta activity is linked to eye movements, but only during memory-guided navigation. Theta is also strongest during longer, more exploratory eye movements.

plos.io/4dwJhR8

Huge congrats to Humza & team! 👏

How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories?

We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate!

Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧠 Our fun new study in @currentbiology.bsky.social, where @pbogdan.bsky.social used fMRI & LLM embeddings from a schema encoding dataset to show that relational semantics have distinct patterns of representation from concept semantics

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

w/@synecphory.bsky.social

Happy to share our new paper on the inhibition of memory retrieval in dissociative amnesia, with @dcdace.bsky.social, Hirokazu Kikuchi, Nobuhito Abe &, Jun Kawaguchi, Mike Kopelman & @memorycontrol.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1017/S003...

What type of relationship is learned during visual statistical learning? Statistical learning enables observers to extract regularities from their environment, but what statistical regularity is extracted remains debated. While previous research has mainly focused on condi...

Which "statistic" governs statistical learning? Find out in this new article of our lab: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Impressive analysis of human data led by David Durpret's team in Oxford:

A learning-evoked slow-oscillatory architecture paces population activity for offline reactivation across the human medial temporal lobe

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This work👇 is now published in PB&R 🥳🎉 #workingmemory link.springer.com/article/10.3...

New MemLab publication led by Will Duckett finds that only trial-by-trial measures reveal links between subjectively experienced vividness and objective memory accuracy in younger and older adults, and people with aphantasia www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Correcting for Unequal Variance in Signal Detection Models Using Response Time This study examines signal detection theory (SDT) analysis of perceptual detection performance using response time (RT) data. A defining feature of detection tasks is the asymmetry between trials with...

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

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:

Interested in cortical wave dynamics? Check out our review on the physics, physiology, and psychology of cortical waves led by J Cruddas with @jchrispang.bsky.social, out now in
@cp-neuron.bsky.social:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"..hippocampal-prefrontal systems represent emotion concepts in a map-like way at multiple levels of abstraction.."

Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems
by
@yumengma.bsky.social and @pkragel.bsky.social

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

Are episodic and semantic memory really that different? Using closely matched tasks, we found no substantial neural differences between recalling personal experiences and general knowledge: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02390-4

A roadmap for conducting more inclusive research on brain resilience in ageing and dementia - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Guidance is lacking on how to best integrate sex, gender and social and structural determinants of health into neuroscience research on brain resilience in ageing and dementia. In this Roadmap article...

Important review by @mnrajah.bsky.social et al. on why we need to increase the diversity of our research on #aging and #dementia.

I'm very proud to be part of this collaboratory 🤩
#psychsciscky #neuroskyence

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