Shawn Schwartz
@shawnschwartz.bsky.social
120 followers 360 following 19 posts
PhD candidate at Stanford Memory Lab. Cog neuro (fMRI/EEG/pupil) of episodic memory and sustained attention lapsing. I also love teaching stats, developing R packages, and building iOS apps. shawnschwartz.com
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Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
thomasp85.com
I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats
ggplot2 4.0.0
A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.
www.tidyverse.org
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
kristinezheng.bsky.social
Linking student psychological orientation, engagement & learning in intro college-level data science

New work ‪‪at @cogscisociety.bsky.social w/ @erikbrockbank.bsky.social @shawnschwartz.bsky.social, C.Bryan, D.Yeager, C.Dweck & @judithfan.bsky.social

poster 8/1 @ 10:30
tinyurl.com/solds-cogsci25
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
jamielarsh.bsky.social
A Temporal Hierarchy of Sustained Attention Dynamics journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
asinclair.bsky.social
Excited to share my new lab website!

The Learning & Behavior Change Lab will launch at Rice in July 2026. I’ll be recruiting over the next year! @ricesocsci.bsky.social

www.sinclairlab-rice.com
Sinclair Lab
The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair
www.sinclairlab-rice.com
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
Thanks @chelseakisil.bsky.social, totally agree! Mindfulness is such a key piece of the puzzle. Excited to see how future research from our group and the field at large might help bridge the gap between the attention economy and meaningful ways to refocus and reengage students.
chelseakisil.bsky.social
Love this. This is where my passion for mindfulness comes in: how can we expect interventions to be effective if the students aren't present with us?
jeffgreene.bsky.social
I think attention has been seriously understudied in the science of learning literature. Someone extremely well-versed in this attention literature could really enhance how we think about learning, self-regulated learning, etc. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
Thanks for the kind note about our paper @jeffgreene.bsky.social ! We have some emerging work that will be out soon addressing some of the points you raised. Happy to chat more if you’re interested.
jeffgreene.bsky.social
I think attention has been seriously understudied in the science of learning literature. Someone extremely well-versed in this attention literature could really enhance how we think about learning, self-regulated learning, etc. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Screenshot of title page of article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science titled: "Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory."
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
russpoldrack.org
The Open Science Room has been an exciting space at the OHBM Meeting for many years, but its future is threatened. Please sign this petition to signal your support for preserving a dedicated space for the OSR at future meetings. ohbm.github.io/osr2025/peti...
OSR Petition
We are launching a petition to request that OHBM preserves the Open Science Room (OSR) as a dedicated space during the annual meeting for the Open Science community. Although Open Science is a well-ac...
ohbm.github.io
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
It was my pleasure @silicolabs.bsky.social!! 🫡 So fun!
silicolabs.bsky.social
We were thrilled to watch our client, @shawnschwartz.bsky.social, present his project using LABO at @stanford.edu Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance!
We got to see how LABO can support research that tests boundaries of human performance. Thanks for showing us around campus! #Stanford #XRResearch
A speaker presents at Stanford, with a slide showing thanks to the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance and promoting a workshop on integrating XR with biosensors using LABO.
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
Thanks @silicoky.bsky.social !! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts 😀
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
This review synthesizes recent work at the intersection of attention and episodic memory, highlighting a number of open questions and future directions.

We are grateful to our collaborators and the Stanford Memory Lab community for their contributions to the ideas discussed herein. 7/N
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
Moreover, new closed-loop methodologies allow real-time monitoring of attention, enabling interventions that adaptively deliver memory probes during optimal attentional states.

We consider how wider adoption of these approaches can inform causal investigations of attention-memory interactions. 6/N
Innovative techniques for real-time closed-loop interventions on attention (and cognition more broadly). Real-time causal intervention studies require constructing and validating a robust (a, left) trial-by-trial pipeline to measure, clean, evaluate, and act on psychophysiological assays in real-time, which then can be used to manipulate the stimulus display, such as that for an (a, right) adaptive memory task with real-time attention tracking and reorienting. Example approaches for the real-time evaluation of psychophysiological assays of attention include (b, left) pupillometry (c, left; e.g., pupil-size dilation or constriction that surpasses a real-time adaptive baseline pupil threshold), (b, middle) scalp EEG (c, middle; e.g., elevated posterior alpha power), and (b, right) functional MRI (c, right; e.g., pattern-classifier decoding of attentional state).
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
Memory precision — the fidelity of remembered details — tends to decline with age.

Recent advances in measurement techniques provide more sensitive ways to assess how attentional and memory processes change across the lifespan. 5/N
Example episodic memory precision task. Participants encounter (a, top) objects shaded in one of 360 possible colors. Participants then encounter (a, bottom) a grayscale version of previously encountered objects and indicate their memory for the color of the object by clicking the corresponding color on the wheel. Illustrative distributions of (b) memory precision errors are mapped from the circular space to the linear space of −180 to +180. Here, young adults (blue dashed line) are schematized to demonstrate higher memory precision than older adults (solid red line).
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
In fact, emerging work suggests that memory encoding and retrieval may be phase-dependent, aligning with hippocampal and/or neocortical theta oscillations.

We review evidence that memory performance can vary systematically with these rhythms. 4/N
Three types of modeled or observed neural theta oscillations. The schematic shows (a) the SPEAR model of hippocampal theta, (b) neocortical theta power (which may or may not relate to theta oscillations in the frontoparietal cortex and/or hippocampus), and (c) theta-specific oscillations in reinstated (i.e., retrieved) episodic content (as quantified by pattern-classifier evidence in neural data). (SPEAR = separate phases of encoding and retrieval).
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
But how are the temporal dynamics of attention related to whether and how we remember?

It turns out that attention fluctuates rhythmically⚡️, particularly in the theta (4–7 Hz) and alpha (8–12 Hz) ranges.

This raises the possibility that episodic memory behavior may also exhibit rhythmicity. 🤔 3/N
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
Attention and episodic memory interact closely:

* Goal-directed (top-down) attention helps prioritize relevant information.

* Stimulus-driven (bottom-up) attention responds to salient events.

We discuss how these systems shape memory encoding and retrieval. 2/N
Assessing the influence of attention on memory retrieval. Shown in (a) are the frontoparietal networks of attention and cognitive control derived from network parcellations computed from the full sample (N = 1,000) in Yeo et al. (2011). (DAN = dorsal attention network; VAN = ventral attention network; CCN = cognitive control network).
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
How do different forms of attention, their neural mechanisms, and related cognitive control processes influence what we learn and remember?

Recent methodological and theoretical advances are offering new insights into the relationship between attention and episodic memory. 1/N
The schematic of the goal-directed memory-retrieval task used in Madore et al. (2020) shows (b) that pre-goal lapsing was measured using EEG posterior alpha power and pupil size in the last 1 s of the ITI, whereas goal-coding strength was measured using a retrieval goal-cue-locked ERP extracted from a midfrontal cluster of electrodes. In (c) the 1 second prior to the onset of the retrieval goal cue, pupil size (and posterior alpha power; not shown) significantly correlated with retrieval success, and midfrontal EEG goal-coding strength partially mediated this effect (n = 75; Madore et al., 2020).
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
I’m pleased to share our new review article, “Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory”, written with Haopei Yang (HY), Alice Xue, and Anthony Wagner, now out in Current Directions in Psychological Science. 🚀🧠 A brief thread 🧵
doi.org/10.1177/09637214251339452
Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory - Shawn T. Schwartz, Haopei Yang, Alice M. Xue, Anthony D. Wagner, 2025
The ability to learn from and remember experiences (episodic memory) depends on multiple neurocognitive systems. In this article, we highlight recent advances i...
doi.org
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social
eyeris: A flexible, extensible, and reproducible pupillometry preprocessing framework in R https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.01.657312v1
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
biorxivpreprint.bsky.social
eyeris: A flexible, extensible, and reproducible pupillometry preprocessing framework in R https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.01.657312v1
shawnschwartz.bsky.social
Thanks for resharing!!
biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social
eyeris: A flexible, extensible, and reproducible pupillometry preprocessing framework in R https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.01.657312v1
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
lucinauddin.bsky.social
Introducing a new tool from @tsbolt.bsky.social, find-viz (FMRI Interactive Navigation and Discovery Viewer)! It’s a browser-based visualization tool built with one purpose in mind: get researchers to spend more time looking at their fMRI data 🧠 @ohbmofficial.bsky.social @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
carlbergstrom.com
I've already had two federal grants terminated and face a 33% pay cut due to future terminations. It's painful, but not as painful as the conversations I'm having every day with brilliant trainees in graduate school and postdoctoral positions who see little future for themselves in US science.
prasad.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/o...

Really important piece to share widely. Too many Americans don’t know how severe a threat this Administration poses to our scientific infrastructure, global leadership, and health security
Opinion | The Uncertain Fate of the Young American Scientist (Gift Article)
Young researchers are choosing between staying in science and staying in the United States.
www.nytimes.com
Reposted by Shawn Schwartz
psyarxivbot.bsky.social
Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory: http://osf.io/yh3mg/