Nichole Bouffard

Heading to @cogneuronews.bsky.social ? I vibe-coded this tool to help you find relevant talks/posters, build a schedule, and export it to your calendar. Enter your research interests and it does the matching.
No personal data is stored. #CNS2026

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

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-...

Adaptive episodic memory: how multiple memory representations drive behavior in humans and nonhumans | Physiological Reviews | American Physiological Society Episodic memory is a declarative long-term memory of a specific past experience. As such, it is multifaceted, encompassing both the objective and subjective components of that experience. These components can be flexibly represented at different levels of granularity, from precise, context-specific details to generalized, gistlike representations. In this review, we suggest that 1) multiple representations of an episodic memory at different levels of granularity are simultaneously encoded into a memory trace and 2) the relative weighting of these representations determines the extent to which a memory is reconstructed or reproduced at retrieval. We propose that this representational flexibility drives adaptive behavior by prioritizing reconstruction or reproduction depending on the age of the memory, its relationship to prior knowledge, current attentional goals or task demands, and individual differences. Drawing on research in humans and nonhuman animals, we show a close correspondence between psychological and neural representations of a memory across encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Specifically, we discuss how hippocampal activity in humans and engram formation and activation in rodents support the reproduction of detailed memory representations, whereas schema formation across species, mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex, facilitates reconstruction and generalization to guide behavior. Finally, we consider how species- and individual-level differences shape episodic memory representations. By integrating findings across species, we illustrate how the correspondence between neural and psychological representations enables multiple memory representations to balance stability and flexibility, ultimately driving adaptive behavior.

How do memories guide behaviour?

Multiple memory representations, from detailed to gist-like, let us flexibly reconstruct or reproduce past experiences to behave adaptively across species.

Now out in Physiological Reviews with Morris Moscovitch, Melanie Sekeres & @brianlevine.bsky.social!

The Aging & Development training program at WashU has an opening for a postdoc!

psychaging.wustl.edu

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

People outside of Minnesota, in
case you are wondering how to help the current situation, this website has many current opportunities to donate and support people who need help in Minnesota. Help pay rent, get groceries, and provide other support for people in hiding.
www.standwithminnesota.com

As tens of thousands across America protest the violence that ICE sows with impunity, federal agents shot and killed another person in Minneapolis today.

ICE terrorizes our cities. ICE puts us all in danger. Abolish ICE.

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Nichole R. Bouffard, Mary Pat McAndrews, et al:

Single voxel autocorrelation reflects hippocampal function in temporal lobe epilepsy

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

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/

My lab is recruiting a postdoc and a full-time research technician to work on an NIH-funded project studying age-related changes in memory for naturalistic events. Behavior, fMRI, and blood-based biomarkers. 3+ years funding guaranteed.

Postdoc: tinyurl.com/ykjfbnj8

Tech: tinyurl.com/2f2hw3f5

🧠 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

Top U.S. Universities Are Quietly Removing LGBTQ+ Discrimination Protections From the Ivy League to elite state schools, this list might surprise you

NEW: My research has found that 17 of the 200 highest-ranked U.S. colleges have removed references to gender identity, gender expression, and/or sexual orientation from their nondiscrimination policies. See the full list here: medium.com/prismnpen/to...

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🧵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...

Congrats Prof Hong!!! They are lucky to have you!

Hippocampal Drift Rate Reflects the Temporal Organization of Memories When freely recalling past events, individuals tend to successively remember stimuli that were studied close together in time—a phenomenon known as temporal clustering. Temporal clustering is thought ...

How do changes in context influence how we organize our memories in time?

Faster contextual changes are associated with faster drift in hippocampal activity and reduced temporal clustering in recalled memories.

Elegant work led by @lindsayrait.bsky.social!

www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

Super excited to share my first preprint with Katherine Duncan and Morgan Barense (@barense.bsky.social) -- "Memory strength at reactivation, not memory age, governs prediction error driven updating of naturalistic event memory"! 🧠🎉https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/q9rkn_v1

I’m also on the job market! If you’re working on predictive processing, event cognition, or computational modeling — or know of exciting postdoc opportunities —please DM!
📄 Paper: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
🙏 With: Matt Bezdek, Tan Nguyen, Chris Hall and @jzacks.bsky.social

Excited to share that our new paper, “Predictive Looking and Predictive Looking Errors in Everyday Activities,” is now out in JEP: General! 🧠
We examined how people’s eye movements reveal both their predictions and their prediction errors while they watch everyday actions.
👇

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!

Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

Sinclair Lab The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair

🌟 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...

On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience).

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

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 &👇

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...

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...

1/ 🚨 Preprint alert!
How does the brain make sense of continuous experience?
We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall.
👉 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233

Repeated Viewing of a Narrative Movie Changes Event Timescales in The Brain Many experiences occur repeatedly throughout our lives: we might watch the same movie more than once and listen to the same song on repeat. How does the brain modify its representations of events when...

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!

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...

Yes! I’m really looking forward to it too!

Thank you Mariam ☺️