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Deeply honored that our paper was recognized with the #SANS2026 Award!

SANS was an important part of this paper's journey! @jadynpark.bsky.social first presented this work at SANS2023, and again in SANS2025, and we benefited greatly from the feedback and discussion!

@mikezhu.bsky.social digesting his win for the #SANS2026 logo competition at Haidilao!

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...

My first paper with @jkragel.bsky.social and Joel Voss came out yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! It’s real! :D

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics and information integration during percept formation often distinguish clinical from nonclinical populations. Computational psychiatry can elucidate these variations through two primary approaches: (i) Bayesian modeling, which treats perception as an unconscious inference, and (ii) an active, information-seeking perspective (e.g., reinforcement learning), which frames perceptual switches as internal actions. Our synthesis aims to leverage multistability to bridge these computational psychiatry subfields, linking human and animal studies as well as connecting behavior to underlying neural mechanisms. Perceptual multistability emerges as a promising noninvasive tool for clinical applications, facilitating translational research and enhancing our mechanistic understanding of cognitive processes and their impairments.

Online Now: Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions

New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com, with @ycleong.bsky.social, Marc Berman, and @joshcjackson.bsky.social! Two-sentence summary: Political pundits often talk as if partisans are divided in how they feel about political issues, as in “Democrats love abortion” or “Republicans hate immigrants.” 1/2

The exposome and attention-related brain networks jointly predict attention problems in early adolescence Background: Attention problems are common transdiagnostic symptoms of psychiatric illness. Although environmental exposures and experiences influence attention during adolescent development, the under...

New preprint out! We show that the exposome and attention-related brain networks jointly predict attention problems in early adolescence—highlighting how environment and brain function have shared and unique associations with reported attention problems. medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Now out in Psychological Medicine!

We identified lifetime exposures to humiliation and entrapment, as well as frontoparietal-left cerebellar RSFC, as correlates of adolescent anxiety and depression symptoms across three time points.

Link: doi.org/10.1017/S003...

New preprint! ✨ Do you and your partner have made-up words ("eggy" to mean awkward)? Do you and your bestie have an anecdote you love to tell together (that time one of you tripped over an acorn)? Do you and your closest colleague have a cherished ritual (weekly lunch at "the usual spot")? 🧵

Attention fluctuates over time and across contexts—how is this reflected in the brain?🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we show that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects changes in attention. Out in @natcomms.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 New paper out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in which we investigated whether conversational alignment — the tendency to reuse each other's words, syntactic constructions, topics, sounds and gestures — can be used as a reliable individual trait. It cannot!
🧵 1/4

doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

A multibrain advantage for cooperative human behaviour www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

mPFC pyramidal neuron synchrony during social competition to form social rankings is disrupted in male Mecp2 knockout mice www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

Psycholinguistic perspectives on face-to-face conversation

Review by Judith Holler & Anna K. Kuhlen

Web: go.nature.com/4c1QRmq
PDF: rdcu.be/e4zP6

#psychscisky

had such a lovely and generative time at SPSP this year! thanks to everyone who stopped by my poster & for all the lovely conversations - feeling very grateful to be living this little life 🤓

The inferred value of unchosen options spreads to related items in memory Counterfactual thinking — considering what could have come of choosing the other path — can facilitate inference. Previous studies have demonstrated t…

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social!

Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does?

In short, yes!

Psycholinguistic perspectives on face-to-face conversation Nature Reviews Psychology - Language production and comprehension are often studied as separate processes, but they are intertwined in naturalistic conversation. In this Review, Holler and Kuhlen...

Psycholinguistic perspectives on face-to-face conversation. New paper by @judithholler.bsky.social & Anna K. Kuhlen
doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00538-1

rdcu.be/e4rlV

A flyer advertising a symposium at SPSP. Speakers include Katie Vasquez, Merrick Osborne, Nina Rodriguez, and Jacinth Tan. Find more information on Whova: https://whova.com/portal/webapp/WMg9c84cPufsiZYYC3hP/Agenda/5067471

I will be chairing a symposium looking at how social hierarchy impacts people across a variety of social environments. There, you can see me talk about popularity as a form of social status and how this may impact children's peer groups.
@merrickosborne.bsky.social

Deeply honored by this recognition from @psychscience.bsky.social, and to be in the company of scientists whose work I greatly admire! A big thank you to lab members, collaborators and mentors, past and present for the work we do together!

Big paper release! ConversationAlign - methods for computing lexical and affective alignment between interlocutors in dyadic conversation transcripts. Open Access in Behavior Research Methods. link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

Excited to be teaching a new undergraduate course on Models of Language and Conversation this term!

Check it out here: context-lab.com/llm-course/

I've added lots of fun interactive demos of chatbots and NLP techniques that let students dig into the approaches.

Various soups on a kitchen stovetop: a vegetarian chili, a potato-leek soup, a sweet pumpkin soup, and a cauliflower rosemary soup

If anyone's looking for ideas for wintertime lab activities, my lab did a soup exchange over the weekend. We had a great time on a day that was cold even by Chicago standards! Credit to @mystiesaturday.bsky.social for suggesting it and to @jadynpark.bsky.social for the photo.

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.

netneurotools: a trainee-oriented approach to network neuroscience | doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Our lab’s internal toolkit for accomplishing everyday tasks in brain imaging ⤵️

Theory of Minds: Early Understanding of Interacting Minds The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused o...

Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb

Continuous dynamics of cooperation and competition in social decision-making - Communications Psychology Using a continuous social foraging game, this study shows that human pairs adopt stable cooperative, competitive, or mixed strategies. A computational model predicts dyadic choices and links these str...

This study shows that human pairs adopt stable cooperative, competitive, or mixed strategies. A computational model predicts dyadic choices and links these strategies to interaction dynamics, payoffs, and cost of cooperation.
@violapriesemann.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Thrilled to see this reviewed preprint by grad student extraordinaire (but bsky-less) Euan Prentis posted on @elife.bsky.social! doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Thank you to the reviewers and editors for encouraging, insightful and helpful comments. We will be revising the paper, stay tuned!

Woohoo! Congrats, Matthias! 🎉

Interested in how the brain prepares for upcoming tasks? We trained a monkey on “6” different cognitive tasks and recorded prefrontal cortical activity. We examined the neural geometry and dynamics during task preparation. Come check out our poster on SUNDAY(Nov 16) from 1-5 PM!

I'm going to present our latest memory model that learns causal inference during narrative comprehension! Stop by the poster on Monday to chat about causality, memory, brain🧠, and AI🤖!
#sfn2025 #sfn25