Regional topography of auditory and visual attention: An fMRI-based meta-analysis More than three decades of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has gathered extensive evidence of auditory and visual attention effects in th…

Regional topography of auditory and visual attention: An fMRI-based meta-analysis

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

I also wonder how this affects the discussion - it will surely affect the nature of the discussion if you know it's being recorded

The NIH Public Access Policy: Q&A for Authors We’ve received many questions from authors, librarians, and research administrators about the NIH decision to accelerate implementation of its public access plan, going into effect on July 1, 2025.…

If you have NIH funding you're stuck between NIH's requirements that you deposit manuscripts in PMC and publishers' assertions that the only way to comply is $$$$ open-access fees.

I found this super useful: www.authorsalliance.org/2025/06/06/t...

Sharing with my own DnD group now!

Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient | PNAS The hippocampus supports episodic memory by binding spatial and semantic information, yet how this information is simultaneously organized along it...

New paper from our group out in @pnas.org! doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... Big thank you to coauthors @vosstacular.bsky.social and @anikka-jordan.bsky.social. Anikka spearheaded this project during her time as an RA and is now a grad student at Yale.

Like the basic science that gave us modern AI, effective teaching methods, and cognitive behavioral therapy? If so, the developments described here should be seriously concerning. Office hours to strategize tomorrow (4/10) at 1:30 Eastern; registration link included: fabbs.org/news/2026/04...

🧠 Fun new paper from Mnemology lab 🧠

Aging is associated with a reduction in the quality of sensory information coupled with increased reliance on semantic information

Here, we show that structural connectivity mediates this visuo-semantic representational shift (VSRS)

Semantic Support in action!

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing.

Concerned about the possible dismantling of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Directorate of NSF?? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Find out what's happening and what we can do to protect behavioral science with @fabbs.org Friday April 10th at 1:30 ET. Register at us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

Transcranial electrical stimulation during wakeful rest can support early memory consolidation in arithmetic learning There is increasing evidence that brief periods of quiet wakeful rest immediately after learning facilitate memory consolidation. Similar to consolida…

These guys report memory enhancement after applying slow oscillation frequency tDCS during post-learning waking rest.

This follows on other evidence that some mechanisms of memory consolidation studied in the context of #sleep might also be present in waking rest.

#neuroskyence #psychscisky

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!

I Wrote Research Funding Announcements for NIH for 22 Years. This Year They’ve Published 14 How NIH went from 756 funding announcements to 14 in two years — and what it means for every disease that depends on federal research

‼️ We are on track for a staggering 98% reduction in posted NIH funding opportunities this year relative to historical norms. Political review and red tape are blocking approval of funding announcements across the board. See Elizabeth Ginexi’s analysis:

elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/i-wrote-re...

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?

In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

A new paper shows that the inferred value of an unchosen option spreads to related items in memory.

In other words: even outcomes you never experienced can generalize to guide future decisions.

Einstein - AI Homework Agent Einstein logs into Canvas and does your homework automatically. He has his own computer — he can watch lectures, read essays, write papers, and participate in discussions.

Is this bad

This is good news for NIH-funded behavioral scientists and for the public; it resolves an unfortunate Catch-22 situation that inflated administrative burden and occasionally excluded basic behavioral science from funding opportunities:
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Aligning eye tracking and free recall time series, we found that increased saccades predict episodic (vs. non-episodic) by 0.5 s.

Just out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, led by Ryan Barker with the inimitable @drjenryan.bsky.social.

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

fMRI BOLD signals in the left angular gyrus and hippocampus are associated with memory precision Abstract. It has been proposed that the neural correlates of successful memory retrieval can be dissociated from the correlates of retrieval precision (fidelity). The specific findings supporting this...

Update: our latest paper is now available with open access: doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
Hou and colleagues reveal the unique role of both the hippocampus and angular gyrus in supporting high fidelity episodic memories!

New paper from our lab by Ricardo Morales-Torres (@rmt93.bsky.social) on the visual and semantic properties that shape the vividness of mental representations for events past.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

The short answer to the title, "What Makes Memories Vivid?" is ... meaning!

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting

I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

Decoding the rhythmic representation and communication of visual contents Rhythmic neural activity is considered essential for adaptively modulating responses in the visual system. In this opinion article we posit that visual brain rhythms also serve a key function in the r...

Decoding the rhythmic representation and communication of visual contents
www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
#neuroscience

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Are reinforcement learning models complete accounts of decisions from experience if they ignore explicit memory?

In this new preprint, we show that people indeed form robust explicit memory representations that flexibly guide later decisions.

🔗 Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

From MRI to Ozempic: breakthroughs that show why fundamental research must be protected In these financially straitened times, funders must recognize that great discoveries often arise from work that was looking for something completely different.

Funders must recognise that great discoveries often come from studies that seeks to advance knowledge for its own sake

go.nature.com/47zrzYZ

New preprint! What happens in the brain when people offload memories into external reminders? Using fMRI decoding, we found that the corresponding neural trace fades until it becomes statistically absent.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵...

"What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn't the topic. You'll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don't end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made."

"you will be intellectually transformed by the process of reckoning with the knowledge these courses are about"

Essential reading about why learning is important even if/when you forget the specific content (and is especially important in these times)

New paper from the lab 🚨
Led by Ali Golbabaei, this study explores the how the composition of prefrontal cortical engrams changes with memory age:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lzT-3BtfH...

OpenNeuro @openneuro.bsky.social just hit a huge milestone: 1500 datasets! Congrats to the team on making this project so successful over the last 7 years.

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory How does the brain access stored knowledge? It has been proposed that conceptual search engages neurocognitive processes similar to foraging in physical space. We tested this idea using intracranial E...

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The science fiction science method - Nature The ‘science fiction science’ method simulates future technologies and collects quantitative data on the attitudes and behaviours of participants in various future scenarios, with the aim of predicting impacts of future technologies before they arrive.

Science fiction science, by the ever-thoughtful Iyad Rahwan: www.nature.com/articles/s41...