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Soroush Mirjalili

@soroushmirjalili.bsky.social

230 followers 210 following 22 posts

Postdoc in the Kuhl Lab at the University of Oregon, PhD from UT Austin. Episodic Memory | Computational Neuroscience | Cognitive Neuroscience | Machine Learning. 🌿 -> 🐝 -> 🐂 -> 🦆, he/him soroushmirjalili.com

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Soroush Mirjalili @soroushmirjalili.bsky.social · Mar 24

Why do we remember some events but forget others? In our recent work published at @naturecomms.bsky.social, @audreyduarte.bsky.social and I used machine learning to simultaneously quantify multiple cognitive components of
episodic memory.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Using machine learning to simultaneously quantify multiple cognitive components of episodic memory - Nature Communications

Mirjalili and Duarte use EEG and machine learning to simultaneously investigate how perception and attention contribute to episodic memory encoding. The study provides insights into episodic memory’s ...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

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 Soroush Mirjalili

Chris Baldassano @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social · 16d

Years ago my lab tried to brainstorm ways to separately manipulate low-level (texture/pattern) and high-level (scene/object) image properties, for studying visual representations in the brain. Thanks to imaginative work by PhD student Zall Hirschstein, we now have a stimulus set that does just that!

Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 16d

Excited to release the SPOT grid: a new image set that factorially crosses scene-object & texture-pattern pairings.

We hope these stimuli will be useful to researchers aiming to (partially) disentangle the contributions of lower- and higher-level visual features to behavior & brain activity.

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8x8 grid depicting the approach to stimulus creation. Feature pairs are on the axes and images are in the cells. The x-axis represents the high-level feature pairs: setting (green) and object (teal). For example, the first column of images all depict “truck” (object) in “field” (setting) rendered in various textures and patterns. The y-axis represents low-level feature pairs: texture (blue) and pattern (purple). For example, the first row of images all depict different objects and settings rendered as if drawn with crayon (texture) and containing large horizontal edges (pattern).

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Soroush Mirjalili @soroushmirjalili.bsky.social · 16d

This is really cool!

Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

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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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

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...
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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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Soroush Mirjalili @soroushmirjalili.bsky.social · Aug 12

Congrats Ziyao!!

Soroush Mirjalili @soroushmirjalili.bsky.social · Aug 3

Congrats!!!

Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Lexi Decker @lexidecker.bsky.social · Jul 31

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms
paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence - Nature Communications

Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Jason Climer @jrclimer.bsky.social · Jul 23

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab!

We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

Hippocampal representations drift in stable multisensory environments - Nature

Tracking of individual place cells in mouse CA1 shows that representational drift is not influenced by changes in environment or behaviour, and is lower for more excitable place cells.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Megan deBettencourt @mdebettencourt.bsky.social · Jul 21

I'm excited to share a new preprint! We built a digital, scalable intervention to reduce intrusive memories, combining an AI chatbot with LLM scoring of human-AI conversations and pupillometry predictors of effort and intervention success. I hope you enjoy! arxiv.org/abs/2507.01081

AI-guided digital intervention with physiological monitoring reduces intrusive memories after experimental trauma

Trauma prevalence is vast globally. Evidence-based digital treatments can help, but most require human guidance. Human guides provide tailored instructions and responsiveness to internal cognitive sta...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Audrey Duarte @audreyduarte.bsky.social · Jul 18

New paper from our lab in which we show that altered arousal in Autism Spectrum Disorders reduces episodic memory for emotional events. Stronger effects with age support an accelerated aging hypothesis of ASD. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Emotional Arousal‐Induced Episodic Memory Benefits Are Attenuated in Autism Spectrum Disorders, Especially in Older Age

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder associated with episodic memory impairment. Although emotional factors such as arousal, as well as age and depression symptoms, ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Marcelo Mattar @marcelomattar.bsky.social · Jul 2

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature

Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

doi.org

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Marta Silva @martamasilva.bsky.social · Jul 1

🧠 Paper out!

We investigated how hippocampal and cortical ripples support memory during movie watching. We found that:

🎬 Hippocampal ripples mark event boundaries
🧩 Cortical ripples predict later recall

Ripples may help transform real-life experiences into lasting memories!

rdcu.be/eui9l

Movie-watching evokes ripple-like activity within events and at event boundaries

Nature Communications - The neural processes involved in memory formation for realistic experiences remain poorly understood. Here, the authors found that ripple-like activity in the human...

rdcu.be

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Soroush Mirjalili @soroushmirjalili.bsky.social · Jun 13

This is really really cool!

Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · Jun 13

Do girls and boys really differ in their mathematical skills? A recent @nature.com paper by @standehaene.bsky.social et al shows that French boys and girls enter school with similar abilities, but after just four months, boys pull ahead 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Rapid emergence of a maths gender gap in first grade - Nature

Boys and girls exhibit very similar maths scores upon school entry, but a gender gap in favour of boys becomes highly significant after 4 months of schooling, which increases with years of schooling,&...

www.nature.com

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Soroush Mirjalili @soroushmirjalili.bsky.social · Jun 12

Congrats!!

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Soroush Mirjalili @soroushmirjalili.bsky.social · Jun 5

Thanks for sharing this, I already linked my submission to this group!

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Paul Masset @paulmasset.bsky.social · Jun 4

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature

Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Juan Linde-Domingo @lindedomingo.bsky.social · May 29

New preprint! 🚨→ Determinants of Visual Ambiguity Resolution. A new work with @ortiztudela.bsky.social @jvoeller.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

We created ~2k images and collected ~100k responses to study visual ambiguity.

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

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Lillian Behm @lillianbehm.bsky.social · May 21

So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...

authors.elsevier.com

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

David Clewett @davidclewett.bsky.social · May 19

New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it.

We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories.

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

Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory

Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Paul Frankland @franklandlab.bsky.social · May 14

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation.

rdcu.be/el18q

A short thread follows for those interested.

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Systems consolidation reorganizes hippocampal engram circuitry

Nature - A study shows that loss of memory precision associated with systems consolidation can be explained by neurogenesis-dependent reorganization of engram circuitry within the hippocampus over...

rdcu.be

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Joel Voss @vosstacular.bsky.social · May 2

Major team effort on phase-locked stim of human hippocampal theta rhythms finally out in the wild! W/ @jkragel.bsky.social @alikwidge.bsky.social and a cast of many. Thanks to the BRAIN Initiative for making it possible.
rdcu.be/ej7VE

Closed-loop control of theta oscillations enhances human hippocampal network connectivity

Nature Communications - Closed-loop brain stimulation of the human hippocampal theta rhythm produces lasting enhancement of network communication. This implicates theta rhythms in human hippocampal...

rdcu.be

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

ckerren.bsky.social @ckerren.bsky.social · Apr 29

🧠✨How do we rebuild our memories? In our new study, we show that hippocampal ripples kickstart a coordinated expansion of cortical activity that helps reconstruct past experiences.

We recorded iEEG from patients during memory retrieval... and found something really cool 👇(thread)

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Reposted by Soroush Mirjalili

Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Apr 28

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

Communications Psychology @commspsychol.nature.com · Apr 28

This study examines how events structured recall, which was impaired for items after event boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showed that decision certainty predicts recall success.
@atabk.bsky.social @wouterkool.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure - Communications Psychology

This study examines how event boundaries affect recall of items in a decision-making task. Events structured recall, which was impaired for items after boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showe...

www.nature.com

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