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Reposted by Buddhika Bellana

Jeni Pathman @drjeni-mdlab.bsky.social · 5d

Love this article! We need more real-life memory studies.
Here is an example study and review from our lab…child development focus.

cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · 7d

Biiiiiiiig congrats, Lexi!!

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Reposted by Buddhika Bellana

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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Hugo Spiers @hugospiers.bsky.social · 7d

New publication from our lab:

Brain Dynamics during Architectural Experience: Prefrontal and Hippocampal Regions Track Aesthetics and Spatial Complexity

1st author is Lara Gregorian, with collaborators @pfvelasco.bsky.social Zita Patai and Fiona Zisch

Stimuli:
www.researchgate.net/publication/...

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Karen Campbell 🇨🇦 @karampbell.bsky.social · 8d

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology

Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Buddhika Bellana

Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 13d

A memory can be represented at different levels of granularity, from highly specific to generalized.

Different representational formats of a memory can be used at different times or in different contexts, and draw on different neural representations.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

OSF

doi.org

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Reposted by Buddhika Bellana

Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 16d

Our cognitive maps of the environment contain hierarchical structure, with some spaces nested in others.

Behavioral responses and brain activity in scene-responsive regions reflect this hierarchical structure.

Neat new work by Michael Peer & @russellepstein.bsky.social!

doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

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Neuroskeptic @neuroskeptic.bsky.social · 17d

Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs

Not a global map, but a local hash: grid cells decorrelate the representation of position and scramble long-range distance information

Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex construct an intriguing multiperiodic representation of space whose properties have been the subject of much theoretical speculation. Here we combine modelin...

www.biorxiv.org

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Bratislav Misic @misicbata.bsky.social · 21d

Neuromorphic hierarchical modular reservoirs | doi.org/10.1101/2025...

How does hierarchical modularity shape computational function? ⤵️

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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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Nora Newcombe @noranewcombe.bsky.social · 22d

New book— just got my copy! I know people often don’t read book chapters but I think that’s a mistake. They are usually much more reflective and wide ranging than journal articles.

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Chris Baldassano @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social · 22d

What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !

Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 22d

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes?

The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions.

Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

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

The Hippocampus Rapidly Integrates Sequence Representations During Novel Multistep Predictions

Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the hippocampus. For such predictions to be useful, they sh...

www.biorxiv.org

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Michael W. Cole @mwcole.bsky.social · 24d

Lab’s latest is out in Imaging Neuroscience, led by Kirsten Peterson: “Regularized partial correlation provides reliable functional connectivity estimates while correcting for widespread confounding”, where we demonstrate a major improvement to standard fMRI functional connectivity (correlation) 1/n

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DrBreaky @drbreaky.bsky.social · 24d

Interested in hippocampal dynamics and their interactions with cortical rhythms?

Our physically constrained model of cortico-hippocampal interactions - complete with fast geometrically informed numerical simulation (available at embedded github repo)

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

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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · 28d

Thanks so much! Happy to hear you think so

Reposted by Buddhika Bellana

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Sebastian Michelmann @s-michelmann.bsky.social · Sep 5

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

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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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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · Sep 5

Let us know what you think!

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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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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · Sep 5

Thanks, Jamie! It was fun to wrangle all together :)

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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · Sep 5

If you're interested in the DMN and stories, hope you find it (or the ref list) useful!

Also, it is part of broader special issue on DMN function (www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...) ! (s/o to Jessica Andrews-Hanna and @neurodenizen.bsky.social for bringing it all together!)

Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences | Functions of the Default Mode Network | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier

Read the latest articles of Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences at ScienceDirect.com, Elsevier’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature

www.sciencedirect.com

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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · Sep 5

In our paper (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...), we identify some key properties of situation models from the discourse processing literature and use them to guide our review of brand-new work on narrative neuroimaging -- with an eye to the regions of the default mode network (DMN).

Situation models and the default mode network

Cognitive neuroscientists continue to puzzle over how the default mode network (DMN) contributes to cognition. A renewed interest in studying narrativ…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · Sep 5

"SOMEBODY HAS BEEN SITTING IN MY CHAIR, AND HAS SAT THE BOTTOM OUT OF IT !"

Reading a story isn't just about the words. Rather, it's about the 'world' (e.g., characters, motivations) the words evoke. Research on discourse processing suggests we track this 'state of affairs' via situation models.

A close-up of the illustration by Brooke (1904) from the last image. Little bear is devastated about the chair. Find full illustrated book here: https://archive.org/details/storyofthreebear00broouoft/page/n17/mode/2up

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Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · Sep 5

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience).

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.

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