Come check out the lab's work at CDS!

Why You Can’t Remember Being a Toddler This form of amnesia is almost universal, but has long been overlooked.

Why can't you remember being a toddler? Or can you?

Nice feature in Time of our lab's work on infantile amnesia at @tcddublin.bsky.social

Also of the labs of @sarahdpower.bsky.social at MPI Berlin, @franklandlab.bsky.social at Sick Kids, and Nick Turk-Browne at Yale.

time.com/7380496/why-...

Are you attending @cogdevsoc.bsky.social 2026? Come join us for an afternoon pre-conference workshop on motivation in development! We'll bring together developmental, educational, and computational perspectives to ask: Can we build a unified account of motivation across the lifespan? ✨

I am very excited to be presenting our work using awake infant fMRI and developmentally inspired deep neural networks to better understand the visual features that the developing brain encodes infants view objects at #CNS2026 in Vancouver this week!

Tasks include watching movies, like Moana, while tracking brain development every 2 weeks
A limitation of the work is that it's so far an n of 1, Ellis' daughter
#CNS2026 7/
@camerontellis.bsky.social

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1).
If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

the human hippocampus receives convergent input from multiple sensory systems, yet we lack a basic understanding of how this structure integrates across senses.

we tackle this problem in our new preprint!

paper: doi.org/10.64898/202...

w/ Aryan Agarwal, @yannanzhu.bsky.social, & Nick Turk-Browne

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi...

Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

And at MIT: @kosakowski.bsky.social, @fkamps.bsky.social, @halieolson.bsky.social, @emilychen.bsky.social, @bmhdeen.bsky.social, Haoyu Du, Camille Osumah, and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Thank you also to the wonderful families and babies who make this work possible!

This exciting collaboration was only possible because of decades of effort from an incredible team of researchers both at Yale: @tristansyates.bsky.social, @jetrach.bsky.social, @camerontellis.bsky.social , and Nick Turk-Browne

We found that movie-based experiments had higher success rates than block or event-related designs, and stimuli featuring social content and faces were more successful than those that did not.

Based on these and other findings, we outline recommendations for future infant fMRI study designs!

Despite substantial methodological differences across labs, we retain a similar amount of usable data per session (about 9 minutes). And while older infant scans can be harder to get started, sessions with older infants, up to ~24 months, ultimately produce the most usable data.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi....

Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!

Now out in an issue! ~~ www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Moments Lab

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

Spontaneous reinstatement of episodic memories in the developing human brain The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...

How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I was given the opportunity to write a brief highlight of a paper that is important to the field & personally meaningful, and I chose to write about @drjenryan.bsky.social's elegant work linking the hippocampus to eye movement markers of relational memory. Read more about it here! 👇🏼
rdcu.be/eyaXA

Incredibly excited and grateful to share that I’ll be starting a lab at The Ohio State University this(!) fall! My lab will study human learning and memory, with related interests in sleep, stress, and time perception. More info soon, but do get in touch if you’re interested in joining!

Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations - Nature Human Behaviour Trach and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations.

Thrilled to share the new paper from the lab out today in
@nathumbehav.nature.com, led by the great @jetrach.bsky.social!

"Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations"

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

Online Now: The ubiquity of episodic-like memory during infancy

Studies targeting domains like object recognition or social cognition often require infants to encode and later recall complex information. We therefore argue that these tasks tap into episodic-like memory and that evidence for infant memory is more prevalent than previously recognized!

In this fun collaboration with @levelsof.bsky.social and Nick Turk-Browne, we first review the classic tasks used to test infant memory -- but we don’t stop there. We also highlight tasks from other cognitive domains that may place hidden demands on episodic-like memory.

So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...

Come check out the lab's research at @srcdorg.bsky.social this week! @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social

🤔 How do individual differences in fetal, infant, and toddler (FIT) neurodevelopment shape long-term #brain and #behavioral outcomes?
💡 A new paper from the FIT’NG community explores this question and the challenges of measuring early brain #development.
🌐 Read more: doi.org/10.1016/j.dc...

Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore and enhance a wide range of human capabilities. However, a barrier to the adoption of BCIs is how long it can take users to learn to control them. W...

New preprint! Excited to share our latest work “Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry” ft. outstanding former undergraduate Chandra Fincke, @glajoie.bsky.social, @krishnaswamylab.bsky.social, and @wutsaiyale.bsky.social's Nick Turk-Browne 1/8

What infant fMRI is revealing about the developing mind Cognitive neuroscientists have finally clocked how to perform task-based fMRI experiments in awake babies. Now they want watch cognition take shape.

A brave (and patient) group of neuroscientists have figured out how to do task-based fMRI in babies and toddlers. They aim to uncover how the infant mind takes shape—and the method has already provided new insight into infantile amnesia. My latest www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne... #neuroskyence

Brilliant new paper from Tristan showing the infant hippocampus can encode memories beginning around 12 months!! An important stride in unravelling the mystery of infantile amnesia, her work suggests that babies have the ability to form memories, but they become inaccessible for retrieval later on

Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.