Nina Rouhani

This position is still open! Come join us!

How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories?

We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate!

Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!

Where you look next isn’t arbitrary.
In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵

what about asking your bi friends about Binocular Rivalry?

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊

Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules.

Led by Dammy Onih!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We review studies showing that when brain areas face similar computational demands in social and non-social context, they perform the same computations. We argue that exaptation (repurposing of traits for new functions) played a key role in brain evolution.

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social:
tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum
@erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com

We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

New preprint from Lindsey Tepfer (@ltjaql.bsky.social) and me! We silenced portions of internal monologues in two films to manipulate participants' access to characters' thoughts. Using ISC and RSA, we found that this aligned later neural processing of the narrative & encoding of trait impressions.

So proud of @meganspurney.bsky.social and team for this exciting new paper from my lab!

Younger adolescents' working memory performance benefits more from reward than older teens and young adults.

This occurs even though all ages report similar preferences about reward value and cognitive demand.

Very proud that this is finally out!

Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..

Neural Reinstatement of Encoding Context Mediates the Switch between Fear and Extinction Recall Abstract. Fear conditioning and extinction generate conflicting memory representations for a conditioned stimulus (CS). Retrieval of either memory is largely determined by the context where the CS is ...

Excited to announce that my last project from grad school is finally out in JoCN! Accepted last fall, but if you’re a fan of formatted PDFs now is your time to strike.

Neural Reinstatement of Encoding Context Mediates the Switch between Fear and Extinction Recall

direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

We are hiring a research specialist, to start this summer! This position would be a great fit for individuals looking to get more experience in computational and cognitive neuroscience research before applying to graduate school. #neurojobs Apply here: research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21503/r...

Misspecified models create the appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice - Communications Psychology In a new computational analysis of previous work, this study shows that a control-free mechanism better accounts for value-based decisions than an account that assumes top-down control invigorating th...

Final paper of my PhD 🤗

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

There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making.

However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.

a woman stands in front of a crowd on a stage with a lot of lights ALT: a woman stands in front of a crowd on a stage with a lot of lights

❗New Paper❗Is children's attention more like a spotlight that darts across time, or one that diffuses across many things at once? How might children's immature attention help their learning? Our Dev Sci Paper has answers! 🧵🎯

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41549519/

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

How do we achieve few-shot generalization? New work led by @fabianrenz.bsky.social dives into the role of replay in learning and using structure to generalize reward. Dream team effort with Shany Grossman @nathanieldaw.bsky.social Peter Dayan & @doellerlab.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Iran report says 16,500 dead in ‘genocide under digital darkness’ — The Times and The Sunday Times ‘You have ten minutes to cry,” came the officer’s curt command to the couple as he revealed the corpse of their twentysomething daughter, gunned down in the historic streets of Isfahan. After searchin...

New report from doctors shows the Iranian regime slaughtered 16,500 protesters during the communications shutdown.

A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!!

This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay!

elifesciences.org/articles/99931

Nicole Rust Nicole RustDirector of Visual Memory LabDepartment of PsychologyUniversity of Pennsylvania A New-New Intellectual Framework for PsychiatryIn 1998, Eric Kandel published the brilliant essay&n...

Recently posted: A video of this talk, intended to trigger conversations.

Please consider watching as a group, followed by a discussion of next steps for psychiatry-related research with your community. Discussions like these are crucial for progress.

mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/Nicole...

Junior Specialist - Lapate Laboratory, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!

📣 Our lab is hiring a full-time RA/lab manager! Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara to study the neural bases of affect-cognition interactions using fMRI and brain stimulation. Great stepping stone to a PhD in cognitive/affective neuro 🧠🐬🏖️ Apply by Jan 22: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03048

🧠 Hiring a Research Assistant/Lab Manager! Share widely! 📍 St. Louis | ⏰ Full-time

We're launching the How We Learn Lab @WashU, studying attention, learning & memory interactions. Perfect for anyone interested in dev cog neuro who wants hands-on experience before grad school.

deckerlab.com

Excited to be teaching a new undergraduate course on Models of Language and Conversation this term!

Check it out here: context-lab.com/llm-course/

I've added lots of fun interactive demos of chatbots and NLP techniques that let students dig into the approaches.

Agency alters memory organization during free recall - PubMed This study examined how agentic decisions in the absence of explicit rewards influence memory organization. Participants studied lists of items to assign as gifts to two characters-either choosing freely (Choice group) or following instructions (Fixed group). During free recall, participants in the …

Agency reorganizes memory around relevant decisions. This was collaboration the deeply missed Sarah DuBrow and steer-headed by our grad students @lindsayrait.bsky.social and Elizabeth Horwath.

p.s. the task design involves curating gift baskets.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41436249/

Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.

What if we could tell you how well you’ll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? ☕️

In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 can be measured with neuroimaging – and 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸.

What has my research lab been up to in 2025?
Time for a wrap up of our research!

This image is a gathering of key figures from our 2025 publications:

Links to publications in the replies:
#spierslab #research #neuroskyence

Had a great time talking to Maggie Penman about new research on lifespan brain development led by @alexamousley.bsky.social in @duncanastle.bsky.social's group.

This is a great summary of the study and a broader discussion of what brain research can teach us about important developmental phases.

Dynamic brain mechanisms supporting salient memories under cortisol The stress-related hormone cortisol alters dynamic brain networks predicting memory and arousal to promote emotional memories.

How does cortisol tune brain networks to form strong emotional memories? Excited to share new work led by amazing former RA Flory Huang w collabs Rajita Sinha and @toddc.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

congrats tyler!!! such awesome news! your lab members will be so lucky and can't wait to see the work out of your lab!

a red building on UPENN's campus photographed during the fall

the Philadelphia skyline, with clear skies and autumn trees

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳

my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception

currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science!

reach out if you're interested 😊