Stop by Poster E73 tomorrow to learn about:
🧠 an LLM pipeline for automated recall scoring, and
📖 how we (@atabk.bsky.social @nicholebouffard.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social) use it to understand whether compressed memories can be unfolded to recover details
#CNS2026
if you’re at #CNS2026 and are interested in key moments and what they do for narrative comprehension and memory, come check out our poster(w/ @zreagh.bsky.social) tomorrow from 2:30-4:30 PM (E78).
draft lab ai policy, feel free to use, modify, or discuss! todd.gureckislab.org/2026/03/06/g...
Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?
In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵
Congratulations Zach! Not surprised at all 🙂 very well deserved.
My poster F105 — The Influence of Event Boundaries on Working Memory Updating — answer this question. 300+ participants, two paradigms, and results that flip the our a prior prediction.
📍 Tue March 10, 8–10am | Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms #CNS2026 2/3 @cogneuronews.bsky.social
the human hippocampus receives convergent input from multiple sensory systems, yet we lack a basic understanding of how this structure integrates across senses.
we tackle this problem in our new preprint!
paper: doi.org/10.64898/202...
w/ Aryan Agarwal, @yannanzhu.bsky.social, & Nick Turk-Browne
Excited to share our paper (with @jzacks.bsky.social), now out in JEP:LMC!
Event boundaries sometimes disrupt temporal order memory in list-based paradigms—but what happens in narratives with more complex structures that better resemble real life?
✨ Link: psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...
But what makes a moment "key moment?"
We propose that key moments capture core semantic information in narratives. Consistent with this idea, removing key-moment segments significantly disrupted the narrative's topic structure.
Additional analyses link these moments to memory organization.
3/ This builds on our earlier work showing that people reliably identify key moments in narratives. These moments synchronize posterior DMN activity across viewers during comprehension and are reinstated during recall.
Earlier thread 👇 bsky.app/profile/adib...
2/ Work with June Kim, Josh Koh, @jzacks.bsky.social, @zreagh.bsky.social, and @alexbarnett.bsky.social.
1/ 🚨 New preprint
Key Moments Scaffold the Semantic Structure of Narratives
Using spoken recall and annotations from three naturalistic datasets with topic modeling, we ask: which parts of a narrative contribute most to its semantic structure and subsequently memory?
Preprint: osf.io/dcfvw
My new book is available open access from MITPress. It's a pretty new take on syntax, with some cool consequences for long-distance syntactic dependencies, and I think it should also appeal to non-minimalist syntacticians (since there isn't really any movement!) direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...
With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.
My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
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 😊
Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵
I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com
New eLife preprint from Tan Nguyen—Pattern-based functional MRI and computational modeling show evidence for multiple signals contributing to updating the brain's representations of events: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
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!
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...
🌟 Excited to share that I'm recruiting PhD students in Psychology for my new lab at Rice University this cycle (Signal boost appreciated!)
To learn more, check out the Learning & Behavior Change Lab website:
www.sinclairlab-rice.com
Applications are due Dec 1st: psychology.rice.edu/graduate/pro...
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 &👇
Credits for the realization : @liliand.bsky.social
Also, I just realised that this might be a key moment version of the preprint 😅
I'm a behind on shouting out new papers!
From Angelique Delarazan: Narrative Coherence Warps the Timeline of Recalled Naturalistic Events. In sum, when recalling stories, people systematically deviate from temporal organization to follow the narrative threads.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
Next up, from @atabk.bsky.social and @wouterkool.bsky.social: Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure. In sum, Ata stuck hidden (and shifting) rules into a word list learning task, creating "events" that influenced the structure of recall.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?
Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall.
Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!
Thank you, Isabel!
10/ TL;DR
Continuous experience is compressed it into a handful of key moments that synchronize across people, shape memory, and dominate recall.
Read the preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233.
9/ This opens new doors:
How are key moments selected in the brain?
How do they interact with schemas and prior knowledge?
Could identifying key moments help us design better learning tools, clinical interventions, or AI models of memory?
