Exciting news for ICOM7 (International Conference on Memory), in Glasgow, 26th-30th July 2027. The conference website is live and we can announce our keynote speakers!

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.

Inside the Sleeping Mind: Memory, Dream Yoga, & the Neuroscience of Sleep with Ken Paller, PhD YouTube video by Experiential Dreamwork

Saturday was a good day for a fun chat about dreams and stuff with Katherine Bell on her podcast "the Dream Journal" (on ksqd.org/the-dream-jo...) - www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ4H...

Knowledge Mapper An interactive tool that maps out everything you know. Answer questions and watch your personalized knowledge map take shape.

Curious what a representation of "everything" you know might look like? Wonder how you might fill it in?

Check out our demo and paper (led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social and now out in @natcomms.nature.com ), or read on to learn more!

Demo: context-lab.com/mapper/
Paper: www.doi.org/10.1038/s414...

For more than a century, the study of brain lesions has been central to understanding cognitive processes and normal brain function (e.g., Broca’s studies).

However, what electrophysiological signatures emerge following a brain lesion?

Picture of Alex Martin, National Institute of Mental Health

The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at NIH is hosting a two-day symposium on 'Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience' in honor of Dr. Alex Martin, to be held at NIH (with online videocast) on April 7th-8th, 2026. Register to attend online or in-person at: bit.ly/4bYlbxw

Happy to share some of the work done in our lab in this mega-thread of nine (!) papers/preprints (+1 sneak peek) from the last six months. Here goes (in no particular order)! **Please repost** and let me know if you need access to any of the PDFs! #sleeppeeps #sleep #neuroscience 1/12

Image showing the paradigm for recording single neurons in a variety of brain regions in humans, while single-pulse TMS was applied to dlPFC. One subpanel shows that single neurons were able to be resolved very early (8ms) after the single-pulse stimulation. Another subpanel shows two example neuron waveforms, along with their inter-spike interval distributions. The final subpanels show spike density functions overlaid on raster plots for the same neuron, separately for active and sham stimulation, in order to demonstrate that active (but not sham) stimulation increased activity in this example neuron.

We have a new preprint examining single neuron responses in humans undergoing TMS (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...). The excellent Charlie Dickey led the way, and I had the privilege to co-supervise this work with @coreykeller.bsky.social and @aaronboes.bsky.social 🧵 (1/7) 🧠🟦 🧠💻

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.

CSBBCS Mtg logo.

The deadline for CSBBCS abstracts has been extended to March 25: www.csbbcs.org/meetings/202...
We already received a record # symposium submissions!
@yorku-cian.bsky.social @erezfreud.bsky.social @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social
@action-brain.bsky.social
@canacn.bsky.social

CNS abstracts will soon post in the Proceedings of the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Soc., hosted as a dedicated partition of @jocnforum.bsky.social , and authors can then append their posters (or graphical abstract) as a “reply” to the abstract. E.g.s already viewable at …

This is a great point. Attendance for CNS in Vancouver was down, owing to stresses like this. Science slows when we don't keep abreast of new tools and findings.

I encourage everyone presenting to post your posters online (blusky, lab websites, whatev) so we can keep our sense of community going!

I think Fodor & Pylyshyn's 1988 paper is possibly the most mischaracterized paper in the history of cognitive science. It's often cited as arguing that neural networks cannot achieve systematicity, compositionality, and productivity. But that's not what they actually argue...

Deconstruction of a memory engram reveals distinct ensembles recruited at learning - Nature Neuroscience Pouget et al. identified distinct CA1 neuron ensembles active during specific moments of fear learning and uncovered the core engram essential for memory formation.

How does the brain build a memory?
A common assumption is that the neurons activated during an experience collectively form the memory engram.
In our new Nature Neuroscience paper (finally out!), we show that this is not the case.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New review from our group out in Nature Reviews Psychology:

Determinants of individual navigation ability

with my excellent co-author: @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social

Stop by Poster E73 tomorrow to learn about:

🧠 an LLM pipeline for automated recall scoring, and

📖 how we (@atabk.bsky.social @nicholebouffard.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social) use it to understand whether compressed memories can be unfolded to recover details

#CNS2026

Conference poster with title "schema-related memory effects are differentially modulated by age and memory performance"

If you're at #CNS2026 and interested in aging, schemas and episodic memory, check out Sophie O'Reilly's poster tomorrow 8-10am (D71)

If you're at #CNS2026 and interested in aging & memory, come see @emilyedavis.bsky.social's poster on implicit associative memory tomorrow at 8am (#63)

If you are at #CNS2026 and are interested in hierarchical structures in event segmentation and "neural state segmentation," come and chat with me at poster A111 this afternoon from 3-5pm :)

Poster Session A #111: "Neural State Segmentation in Naturalistic Goal-directed Activities" 🧠🎞️

Xuan Zhang D52, the effects of event segmentation on temporal organization of free recall using staged events. Erik Wing D83 Environment and expertise shape spatiotemporal variation in conceptual knowledge. Lei Zhang D79 Theta-mediated conceptual reinstatement in vmPFC precedes perceptual reinstatement in ventral visual cortex during memory recall.

Come see our posters #CNS2026. All three are on session D Monday morning. Fantastic works from Xuan Zhang with @brianlevine.bsky.social, Dr. Erik Wing with @drjenryan.bsky.social and Dr. Lei Zhang with Dr. Claude Alain.

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thanks Sarah! All cred (street or otherwise) goes to Erik ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

'Birdbrain' benefits: How being an expert birdwatcher may boost cognition New research shows that seasoned birders — including older adults — had denser tissue in parts of the brain tied to attention and perception.

Here are a couple of nice write-ups on this:
www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

Stay tuned (pun intended) for more form Erik, who also trained participants on novel birds and demonstrated rapid (1-hr.) learning-related microstructural cortical plasticity determined by their prior knowledge

Lateral and medial inflated brains showing lower Mean Diffusivity in experts vs. novices in fronto-parietal and inferotemporal cortices. Two plots show age by Mean Diffusivity across the two groups. Within the ROI's MD increases with age in novices, but that increase is more gradual in experts. By contrast, the groups show equivalent age-related increase in MD for the entire gray matter, suggesting more gradual MD increase in experts is limited to areas that show expertise-related increased microstructural complexity.

We characterized neuroplasticity across the adult lifespan, examining experts between 24 and 75 years of age. Experts showed attenuated age-related decline in specific cortical regions, consistent with the possibility that sustained, intensive knowledge acquisition enhances cortical resilience

Regions demonstrating structural remodeling were preferentially recruited when experts processed perceptually challenging, unfamiliar species. Thus, experience-tuned cortical territories are selectively and dynamically engaged to support expert-level performance under high-demand conditions

Experts exhibited lower mean diffusivity in frontoparietal and posterior cortices, indicative of increased microstructural tissue complexity. These structural adaptations were predictive of superior identification accuracy, delineating a distributed and functionally relevant “expertise network”

Prior work has primarily emphasized motor or musical expertise; we examined conceptual expertise in bird identification. The sustained demands of fine-grained perceptual discrimination and categorical differentiation across hundreds of species are associated with large-scale cortical reorganization.

We used multimodal imaging to probe experience-dependent neuroplasticity, linking microstructural remodeling with task-evoked functional tuning. We demonstrate that decades of domain-specific experience reshape both the anatomical architecture and the task-related dynamics of the adult brain.

The tuned cortex: Convergent expertise-related structural and functional remodeling across the adult lifespan Neuroplasticity is a defining property of the brain. Structural and functional brain changes arise soon after learning and are particularly evident following years of practice that underpin expert per...

New paper from our team led by the incredibly talented Dr. Erik Wing (with Jordan Chad, Geneva Mariotti and @drjenryan.bsky.social). www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...