Delighted to be at SANS sharing our latest naturalistic work on how emotion shapes temporal memory! 🕰️

MDRS MDRS is a professional society dedicated to the study of memory. Members engage in basic and clinical research into how memory works and why it fails.

The Memory Disorders Research Society (www.memorydisorders.org) is now seeking nominations for new members! Self-nominations are welcome. Application is open until April 15 @ 11:59pm PT.

Reach out if you have questions about the society or its (amazing) annual meeting! forms.gle/Qn7mchoPpaqL...

We only experience time moving forward. But memory can both predict what comes next and reconstruct what must have happened before.

In a new @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint, we show how hippocampal development enables this flexible representation of time 🧵

To close the symposium, Regina Lapate extends the story past shock+picture lab pairings and into real life events: how our emotions influence the way we remember the timeline of our autobiographical memories.

Fascinating and very carefully conducted work into emotion-memory-time dynamics!

#CNS2026

If you are at #CNS2026, come check out Jingyi Wang's talk in the symposium "Neural Time Machine: Temporal Organization of Experience in the Brain" (starting now!), and tomorrow PM I will be sharing some of our new work at the symposium "Emotion and the organization of temporal context in memory".

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking:

Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods?

(alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

Love the task design—very cool!

It’s out!

Passage of time in the brain, in the mind, both?

Commentary on @lapate.bsky.social recent work
#drift #fmri #human #time
Please,👇 if we missed relevant observations in the field!

w/ @vigano.bsky.social @beneuroscience.bsky.social & R. Bordas
@sfnjournals.bsky.social
@brainthemind.bsky.social

What is the brain for? Active inference is widely discussed as a unifying framework for understanding brain function, yet its empirical status remains debated. Our review identifies core predictions across the action-perception cycle and evaluates their empirical support: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to share Jongmin Lee’s discovery of abstract codes guiding prospective working memory!
Thread below.
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

Curious what you think of the Barbas lab proposals that cyto and connectivity are deeply related? E.g., feedforward and feedback connections based on cortical types. Seems to be a nice unifying idea of why both matter in different ways and are related evolutionarily, etc: doi.org/10.1007/s004...

It won't actually exist for another month or so, but because it now 'exists' on amazon, I'll humbly observe that, after working through this book, your student/trainee would be able to read and understand all but two or three papers in this week's J. Neurosci. Check it out:

Junior Specialist - Lapate Laboratory, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!

📣 Our lab is hiring a full-time RA/lab manager! Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara to study the neural bases of affect-cognition interactions using fMRI and brain stimulation. Great stepping stone to a PhD in cognitive/affective neuro 🧠🐬🏖️ Apply by Jan 22: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03048

📣 We’re currently reviewing applications for this postdoctoral position. Next review date: Jan 26. Feel free to reach out with any questions! recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03027

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.

Agency alters memory organization during free recall - PubMed This study examined how agentic decisions in the absence of explicit rewards influence memory organization. Participants studied lists of items to assign as gifts to two characters-either choosing freely (Choice group) or following instructions (Fixed group). During free recall, participants in the …

Agency reorganizes memory around relevant decisions. This was collaboration the deeply missed Sarah DuBrow and steer-headed by our grad students @lindsayrait.bsky.social and Elizabeth Horwath.

p.s. the task design involves curating gift baskets.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41436249/

Congratulations, Karolina—so well deserved!

Calling all Affective Neurosci, basic, clinical, animal, mineral & otherwise: SFN's accepting proposals for symposia @ the 2026 DC meeting. Please consider reaching out to your pals &, maybe even dropping a line to someone you admire from afar, & organizing a submission. www.sfn.org/meetings/neu...

Frontoparietal Hubs Leverage Probabilistic Representations and Integrated Uncertainty to Guide Cognitive Flexibility Adaptive behavior requires integrating information from multiple sources. These sources can originate from distinct channels, such as internally maintained latent cognitive representations or external...

New paper from Steph. Watch out, she has many more coming.
www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

Emotional learning selectively distorts the temporal organization of memory: A quantitative synthesis Episodic memory allows us to remember when an event occurred by situating it within a coherent temporal context. Pavlovian fear conditioning, a widely…

New lab paper: "Emotional learning selectively distorts the temporal organization of memory: A quantitative synthesis." Across 17 different studies, fear conditioning consistently distorted temporal source memory for information encoded before and after. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

with @johnsakon.bsky.social @virginievanw.bsky.social @lapate.bsky.social and others #sfn25

Neural Representation of Episodic Time Inspired by recent discoveries of neural populations that track time for specific moments (time cells) and elapsed durations (temporal context and periodic time cells), this review, based on a minisym...

For those coming to SfN, I’ll be giving a talk showing evidence of hippocampal neuronal replay 🎞️🔁 in HUMANS as part of the “Representation of Time in the Brain” minisymposium (Wednesday morning)

Our stellar group of speakers also wrote a preview of the session in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #sfn2025
🧠

🧠 The LEAP Neuro Lab is headed to #SfN25! Check out our new work on intrinsic temporal tracking in the brain, emotion-temporal memory interactions, and the neural correlates of sympathetic activity during threat using a new MRI-compatible measure w/ high temporal resolution. Hope to see you there!

🧠 The LEAP Neuro Lab is headed to #SfN25! Check out our new work on intrinsic temporal tracking in the brain, emotion-temporal memory interactions, and the neural correlates of sympathetic activity during threat using a new MRI-compatible measure w/ high temporal resolution. Hope to see you there!

Structure in noise: Recurrent connectivity shapes neural variability to balance perceptual and cognitive demands in the human brain Does neural variability reflect random noise or a feature that benefits adaptive behavior? Using intracranial recordings in humans, Terlau et al. demonstrate that neural variability results from the r...

New work from the lab published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social by @jonasterlau.bsky.social and Jan Martini. We describe that trial-by-trial variability indexes recurrent connectivity across the cortical hierarchy, which supports reliable and flexible coding www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... (1/4)

The Computational and Cognitive Neural Sciences lab (ballardlab.org) at UC Riverside is recruiting psychology PhD students to join our team! Check out the flyer to learn about the lab and our stellar research community at UCR. Apply by 12/1!
drive.google.com/file/d/19m8i...

The more I think about this, the more frustrated I get with our leadership. It is hard to see this decision as anything but preemptive compliance.

Postdoctoral Scholar- Affective & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!

Applications due Dec 1. Please spread the word! recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03027