Asaf Gilboa

If you are at #CNS2026 and are interested in hierarchical structures in event segmentation and "neural state segmentation," come and chat with me at poster A111 this afternoon from 3-5pm :)

Poster Session A #111: "Neural State Segmentation in Naturalistic Goal-directed Activities" 🧠🎞️

Xuan Zhang D52, the effects of event segmentation on temporal organization of free recall using staged events. Erik Wing D83 Environment and expertise shape spatiotemporal variation in conceptual knowledge. Lei Zhang D79 Theta-mediated conceptual reinstatement in vmPFC precedes perceptual reinstatement in ventral visual cortex during memory recall.

Come see our posters #CNS2026. All three are on session D Monday morning. Fantastic works from Xuan Zhang with @brianlevine.bsky.social, Dr. Erik Wing with @drjenryan.bsky.social and Dr. Lei Zhang with Dr. Claude Alain.

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thanks Sarah! All cred (street or otherwise) goes to Erik ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

'Birdbrain' benefits: How being an expert birdwatcher may boost cognition New research shows that seasoned birders — including older adults — had denser tissue in parts of the brain tied to attention and perception.

Here are a couple of nice write-ups on this:
www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

Stay tuned (pun intended) for more form Erik, who also trained participants on novel birds and demonstrated rapid (1-hr.) learning-related microstructural cortical plasticity determined by their prior knowledge

Lateral and medial inflated brains showing lower Mean Diffusivity in experts vs. novices in fronto-parietal and inferotemporal cortices. Two plots show age by Mean Diffusivity across the two groups. Within the ROI's MD increases with age in novices, but that increase is more gradual in experts. By contrast, the groups show equivalent age-related increase in MD for the entire gray matter, suggesting more gradual MD increase in experts is limited to areas that show expertise-related increased microstructural complexity.

We characterized neuroplasticity across the adult lifespan, examining experts between 24 and 75 years of age. Experts showed attenuated age-related decline in specific cortical regions, consistent with the possibility that sustained, intensive knowledge acquisition enhances cortical resilience

Regions demonstrating structural remodeling were preferentially recruited when experts processed perceptually challenging, unfamiliar species. Thus, experience-tuned cortical territories are selectively and dynamically engaged to support expert-level performance under high-demand conditions

Experts exhibited lower mean diffusivity in frontoparietal and posterior cortices, indicative of increased microstructural tissue complexity. These structural adaptations were predictive of superior identification accuracy, delineating a distributed and functionally relevant “expertise network”

Prior work has primarily emphasized motor or musical expertise; we examined conceptual expertise in bird identification. The sustained demands of fine-grained perceptual discrimination and categorical differentiation across hundreds of species are associated with large-scale cortical reorganization.

We used multimodal imaging to probe experience-dependent neuroplasticity, linking microstructural remodeling with task-evoked functional tuning. We demonstrate that decades of domain-specific experience reshape both the anatomical architecture and the task-related dynamics of the adult brain.

The tuned cortex: Convergent expertise-related structural and functional remodeling across the adult lifespan Neuroplasticity is a defining property of the brain. Structural and functional brain changes arise soon after learning and are particularly evident following years of practice that underpin expert per...

New paper from our team led by the incredibly talented Dr. Erik Wing (with Jordan Chad, Geneva Mariotti and @drjenryan.bsky.social). www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Registration and poster abstract submission now open for the @yorku-cian.bsky.social symposium on 'Cognition & Action', June 4,5 following CSBBCS, with a mix of speaker topics on philosophy, behaviour, neuroimaging, and neurophysiology.

See: www.yorku.ca/research/cia...

ICOM7, International Conference on Memory. 26th-30th July 2027. Glasgow, Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SEC)

Save the date for ICOM-7 (aka the Memory Olympics)

(1/5)
🧵Our new preprint shows how the brain develops to transform how kids, teens & adults represent & navigate their world: shifting from local, moment-to-moment memories in childhood to integrated, global cognitive maps in adulthood 🧠

Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception - Nature Human Behaviour Vision–language deep neural network models better explain human visual cortex activity than vision-only models. Damaging brain connections between visual and language areas reverses this pattern, suggesting that human visual perception is modulated by language.

Using brain lesions and DNN models, this article suggests that human visual perception is modulated by language.

The 5th International Sleep Replay Workshop is just 80 days away- Mar 6th in Vancouver!

isrw.bio.uci.edu

If you'd like to be considered to give a short talk, register by December 19th, 2025.

General registration & poster submission ends February 15th, 2026.

@cnsmtg.bsky.social

Please repost

Thanks to @cnn.com for covering our research on London taxi drivers in their new, rather chatty, format 'Creators'

Taxi driver Tom Scullion is the star of this piece. He trains others to learn the knowledge an has so many insights into that process.
#neuroskyence

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7df...

Congrats @sjo09.bsky.social! Your trailblazing engram discoveries are unforgettable. So happy that the Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize is honoring YOUR Era's tour @sfn.org.

Happy to share our review "Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment” in @npp-journal.bsky.social! We examine neurobiological, environmental & behavioral evidence for human critical periods in sensory and association cortex +discuss new research directions rdcu.be/eMkVU 🧵

A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation - Nature NextBrain is an open source, probabilistic atlas of the entire human brain, assembled using artificial-intelligence-enabled registration and segmentation methods to reconstruct the multimodal serial h...

This is 🤯

All publicly available. Looks like an amazing new histology-based human probabilistic atlas and parcellation tool.

#neuroskyence #mri #brainmapping

A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation | Nature share.google/5AD0iW7pxgb4...

New paper from the lab 🚨
Led by Ali Golbabaei, this study explores the how the composition of prefrontal cortical engrams changes with memory age:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lzT-3BtfH...

New paper from the lab led by Ali Golbabaei. If you’re interested in systems consolidation, generalization and hippocampal neurogenesis a short 🧵 follows:

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lsO73QW8S...

The Hippocampus Rapidly Integrates Sequence Representations During Novel Multistep Predictions Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the hippocampus. For such predictions to be useful, they sh...

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes?

The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions.

Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

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

👩‍💻 New preprint out (FIRST one of my PhD journey) with the incredible @lindedomingo.bsky.social @ortiztudela.bsky.social @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

"From sudden perceptual learning to enduring engrams: A representational perspective" 🧠

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

ולא לשכוח שזכויות היוצרים על הביטוי שייכות לאהוד ברק. בקצב הזה לא רק שלא יהיה פרטנר גם לא יהיה על מה לנהל משא ומתן, ובא לציון גואל

New preprint from Yining Ding @liliand.bsky.social! People use semantic event knowledge and grouping to remember the temporal order of events.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hippocampal mismatch signals are based on episodic memories and not schematic knowledge | PNAS Prediction errors drive learning by signaling mismatches between expectations and reality, but the neural systems supporting these computations rem...

We make predictions based on general knowledge and/or specific memories. Different brain areas are active when these distinct predictions are violated – and hippocampus selectively responds to prediction errors based on episodic memory.

Cool work by @chrismbird.bsky.social @ayab.bsky.social et al!

REM Sleep Misfires: Intruding Delta Waves Forecast Tau, Amyloid, and Forgetting in Aging Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep degrades with age, and more severely in Alzheimer's disease (AD). REM sleep comprises about twenty percent of adult sleep, alternates between phasic and tonic periods, a...

Fresh results now in bioRxiv! 🎉 We know about the function of NREM sleep for overnight memory consolidation. But what about REM sleep? We found that in aging, slow delta waves can intrude phasic REM periods, and this, is associated with worse overnight consolidation 🧠 (1/5) doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Decoding memory function through naturalistic gaze patterns | PNAS Eye movements are closely linked to encoding and retrieval processes, with changes in viewing behavior reflecting age- and pathology-related memory...

Slowly making my way through that grad school data!

Decoding memory function through naturalistic gaze patterns | PNAS share.google/vuOSbiRk9nBH...