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Reposted by Adi Upadhyayula

Jeff Zacks @jzacks.bsky.social · 8d

New eLife preprint from Tan Nguyen—Pattern-based functional MRI and computational modeling show evidence for multiple signals contributing to updating the brain's representations of events: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Multiple event segmentation mechanisms in the human brain

elifesciences.org

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Reposted by Adi Upadhyayula

Lexi Decker @lexidecker.bsky.social · 7d

Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨!

I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com

Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!

DeckerLab

www.deckerlab.com

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Reposted by Adi Upadhyayula

Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · 22d

New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Natural language processing captures memory content associated with shared neural patterns at encoding

People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are cor...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Adi Upadhyayula

Allie Sinclair @asinclair.bsky.social · Sep 8

🌟 Excited to share that I'm recruiting PhD students in Psychology for my new lab at Rice University this cycle (Signal boost appreciated!)

To learn more, check out the Learning & Behavior Change Lab website:
www.sinclairlab-rice.com

Applications are due Dec 1st: psychology.rice.edu/graduate/pro...

Sinclair Lab

The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair

www.sinclairlab-rice.com

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Reposted by Adi Upadhyayula

Hayoung Song @hayoungsong.bsky.social · Sep 5

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

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

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events

Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

www.biorxiv.org

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 5

Credits for the realization : @liliand.bsky.social

Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 5

Also, I just realised that this might be a key moment version of the preprint 😅

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Sep 3

I'm a behind on shouting out new papers!

From Angelique Delarazan: Narrative Coherence Warps the Timeline of Recalled Naturalistic Events. In sum, when recalling stories, people systematically deviate from temporal organization to follow the narrative threads.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Sep 3

Next up, from @atabk.bsky.social and @wouterkool.bsky.social: Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure. In sum, Ata stuck hidden (and shifting) rules into a word list learning task, creating "events" that influenced the structure of recall.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

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Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · Sep 2

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?

Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall.

Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

Repeated Viewing of a Narrative Movie Changes Event Timescales in The Brain

Many experiences occur repeatedly throughout our lives: we might watch the same movie more than once and listen to the same song on repeat. How does the brain modify its representations of events when...

www.biorxiv.org

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

Thank you, Isabel!

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

10/ TL;DR
Continuous experience is compressed it into a handful of key moments that synchronize across people, shape memory, and dominate recall.
Read the preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233.

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

9/ This opens new doors:
How are key moments selected in the brain?
How do they interact with schemas and prior knowledge?
Could identifying key moments help us design better learning tools, clinical interventions, or AI models of memory?

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

8/ Why does this matter?
It suggests memory is not just shaped by boundaries but also by informative highlights — the emotionally rich, narratively crucial, or semantically dense bits that define how stories are remembered.

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

7/ Together, these results suggest:
Experience is compressed into a subset of meaningful moments. Key moments are partly distinct from event boundaries.
They organize both comprehension and memory reinstatement.

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

6/ 🔄 During recall, the same pattern emerged.
Neural activity patterns linked to key moments dominated reinstatement in the posterior-medial cortex — showing that memory retrieval relies heavily on these compressed anchors.

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

5/ 🧠 Next, we turned to fMRI data.
When participants viewed the same movie, brain activity in the Default Mode Network (DMN) synchronized strongly at key moments.
This suggests these moments anchor shared representations of the underlying experience across people.

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

4/ Were these just event boundaries — moments when one event ends and another begins?
Not quite.
Although there was overlap between event boundaries and key moments, there was also non-overlap. Our findings suggest that they are at least somewhat different.

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

3/ To capture key moments, we developed a storyboard paradigm:
After watching short films, participants were asked to retell the story by picking the frames that best captured what happened.

The result: people consistently agreed on which frames mattered most.

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

2/ Not all moments in life are equal. Think of a movie: you might recall the shocking twist or emotional climax, while most scenes fade away.
We set out to study these key moments: What are they? How do people agree on them? And what happens in the brain when they occur?

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

work done with @jzacks.bsky.social‬ @zreagh.bsky.social‬ and @jmhenderson.bsky.social‬

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Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

1/ 🚨 Preprint alert!
How does the brain make sense of continuous experience?
We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall.
👉 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · Aug 25

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9

Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications

When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...

doi.org

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