Participants in conversations need to associate words their speakers but also retain those words general meanings. For example, someone talking about their hand is not referring to the other speakers ...

The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...

The placenta plays vital roles in supporting fetal development. Here, Richards et al. develop a high-throughput bioprinted trophoblast organoid model to recapitulate the microenvironment of the e...

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...

The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Considerable progress has been made in understanding early memory development. However, much of this research pre-dates contemporary theories of memory systems in the mature brain. This review provides a refresher on these conceptual frameworks and proposes a common theoretical foundation for reconciling adult and infant studies. This foundation enables a critical analysis of infant studies that have directly tested memory and suggests that they may not capture the full nature and extent of episodic memory abilities in infancy. The analysis is extended to infant studies that are ostensibly focused on cognitive domains other than memory and finds that many such tasks require episodic-like memory. Thus, there may be substantially more evidence for episodic-like memory in infants than previously recognized.

Author summary This study explores how the brain represents two key dimensions of emotional experience: valence (how positive or negative an experience feels) and arousal (the level of emotional activ...

Federal officials said Harvard must enact “merit-based reform” in hiring and admissions, among other things. Harvard called the demands unlawful.