Maria Wimber

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 🧵

Agree! Think we got the data to look at that!

Awesome work, using RT modelling to show clear prioritisation of semantic features during WM maintenance! Especially for information that had fallen outside the focus of attention ➡️ more evidence that “silent” WM traces behave like episodic memory.

🚨Preprint! “Bayesian surprise tracks the strength of perceptual insight” - Work with @lindedomingo.bsky.social & @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

Ever wondered what factors influence the subjective experience of suddenly understanding a previously unclear input?

Click below:
doi.org/10.64898/202...

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🔥 New preprint!

Excited to share Johannah's fantastic work -> a preregistered study with two replications showing how uncertainty shapes perceptual insight.

As always, it’s been a great ride working with Johannah and Carlos.

Shortcuts as a behavioural signature of cognitive map use? My awesome colleagues Eleonore Duvelle & Roddy Grieves revisit Tolman’s sunburst maze and are not convinced…

Nice work, showing that active retrieval from working memory benefits later long-term memory, especially for deprioritised (latent state, episodic-like?) items!

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!

Looking forward to this one!

Save the date for the 1st MEEP – Heidelberg Summer School on Memory and Sleep: May 31st to June 3rd
Keynote speakers: @marwimber.bsky.social @mgarvert.bsky.social & Dan Bendor
Sessions on:
memory processes
sleep & replay
analysis and stimulation techniques
www.zi-mannheim.de/forschung/ab...

plz rp

Happy birthday!

Freudian slip of the day: called another department the “School of Wealth & Hellbeing”.
US politics invading my subconscious?

Huge CONGRATULATIONS Peter!

the reason its bad to run universities like businesses is that almost all businesses fail on any reasonable timeline of evaluation.

hudson's bay made it the longest and even they only got to about half an oxford of longevity

New preprint alert!

Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations

#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪

New preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social

Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Applications are open for James McCune Smith PhD Scholarships to support Black UK students with full (up to 4 years) PhD funding. Interested in a project on #memory in #psychology & #neuroscience? Do message me to have a chat!
Deadline 31st Jan. #phd #blacksky
www.gla.ac.uk/scholarships...

Memorability of visual stimuli and the role of processing efficiency Nature Reviews Psychology - Certain items are better remembered than others across individuals, a property known as memorability. In this Review, Bainbridge and colleagues detail memorability...

What makes visual stimuli memorable? Wilma Bainbridge, @keisukefukuda.bsky.social, Lore Goetschalckx, and I investigate the role of processing fluency for memorability in a new review paper in Nature Reviews Psychology. Check it out!

rdcu.be/eSyjz

Thrilled that my recent paper, Hippocampal Ripples during Offline Periods Predict Human Motor Sequence Learning, was selected for the “This Week in The Journal” highlight! 🤩
Huge thanks to @bstaresina.bsky.social and our collaborators who made this work possible!
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
#JNeurosci

Asking informally: does anyone know someone who might be interested in a postdoc focused on understanding changes in memory representations driven by attention using EEG? ⚡️Thanks!

BIOMAG 2025，在线会议，会议直播平台，网络会议直播，美迪康会务通，学术会议管理系统，会议活动管理，注册签到管理，会场幻灯片传输转播，PPT传输，会议网络直播，电子壁报管理系统，医学会，会员管理系统

Exciting news from the chairs of Biomag 2026, Prof. Jiahong Gao and Prof. Huan Luo — the conference website is now live: biomag2026.scimeeting.cn The meetings take place in Beijing, 23–25 August 2026. Save the date and start thinking about ideas for posters and symposia! Please share with colleagues

Life Sciences PhD studentships available in amazing Glasgow! Deadline Jan 12

General details here: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl...

My project, on cognitive mapping in 3D space in mice and humans, available here: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl...

A neural state space for episodic memories Episodic memories are highly dynamic and change in nonlinear ways over time. This dynamism is not captured by existing systems consolidation theories …

I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting.

A neural state space for episodic memories

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

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪

Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...

@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖

Monty Python understood p-hacking

Bonjour Montréal, pleased to meet you! Look forward to seeing the memory family at #MDRS2025!

Photo of a Kansas City Chiefs press conference with Andy Reid, Travis Kelce, and Patrick Mahomes. Reid is wearing a gray suit and red tie with a lapel pin. Kelce is wearing a camp-style short-sleeved shirt with a bird print, along with a suede cap, and Mahomes is wearing a white collared shirt, a pink checkered double-breasted vest, and a pale pink tie.

JEP: General; Psych Science; Nature Human Behaviour

Let this be a motto for all of us, when we peer review:
“Review the manuscript in front of you, not the one you wish existed.”
@earlkmiller.bsky.social

I continue to believe sharing example materials is useful in academia, so in that spirit, my tenure statements and CV are now available on our Resources for Researchers website (bottom of the New PI page: www.plasticityinneurodevelopmentlab.com/resourcesfor...)