Marc Coutanche

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 🧵

A new paper shows that the inferred value of an unchosen option spreads to related items in memory.

In other words: even outcomes you never experienced can generalize to guide future decisions.

Einstein - AI Homework Agent Einstein logs into Canvas and does your homework automatically. He has his own computer — he can watch lectures, read essays, write papers, and participate in discussions.

Is this bad

This is good news for NIH-funded behavioral scientists and for the public; it resolves an unfortunate Catch-22 situation that inflated administrative burden and occasionally excluded basic behavioral science from funding opportunities:
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Aligning eye tracking and free recall time series, we found that increased saccades predict episodic (vs. non-episodic) by 0.5 s.

Just out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, led by Ryan Barker with the inimitable @drjenryan.bsky.social.

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

fMRI BOLD signals in the left angular gyrus and hippocampus are associated with memory precision Abstract. It has been proposed that the neural correlates of successful memory retrieval can be dissociated from the correlates of retrieval precision (fidelity). The specific findings supporting this...

Update: our latest paper is now available with open access: doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
Hou and colleagues reveal the unique role of both the hippocampus and angular gyrus in supporting high fidelity episodic memories!

New paper from our lab by Ricardo Morales-Torres (@rmt93.bsky.social) on the visual and semantic properties that shape the vividness of mental representations for events past.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

The short answer to the title, "What Makes Memories Vivid?" is ... meaning!

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting

I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

Decoding the rhythmic representation and communication of visual contents Rhythmic neural activity is considered essential for adaptively modulating responses in the visual system. In this opinion article we posit that visual brain rhythms also serve a key function in the r...

Decoding the rhythmic representation and communication of visual contents
www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
#neuroscience

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Are reinforcement learning models complete accounts of decisions from experience if they ignore explicit memory?

In this new preprint, we show that people indeed form robust explicit memory representations that flexibly guide later decisions.

🔗 Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

From MRI to Ozempic: breakthroughs that show why fundamental research must be protected In these financially straitened times, funders must recognize that great discoveries often arise from work that was looking for something completely different.

Funders must recognise that great discoveries often come from studies that seeks to advance knowledge for its own sake

go.nature.com/47zrzYZ

New preprint! What happens in the brain when people offload memories into external reminders? Using fMRI decoding, we found that the corresponding neural trace fades until it becomes statistically absent.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵...

"What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn't the topic. You'll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don't end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made."

"you will be intellectually transformed by the process of reckoning with the knowledge these courses are about"

Essential reading about why learning is important even if/when you forget the specific content (and is especially important in these times)

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...

OpenNeuro @openneuro.bsky.social just hit a huge milestone: 1500 datasets! Congrats to the team on making this project so successful over the last 7 years.

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory How does the brain access stored knowledge? It has been proposed that conceptual search engages neurocognitive processes similar to foraging in physical space. We tested this idea using intracranial E...

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory

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

The science fiction science method - Nature The ‘science fiction science’ method simulates future technologies and collects quantitative data on the attitudes and behaviours of participants in various future scenarios, with the aim of predicting impacts of future technologies before they arrive.

Science fiction science, by the ever-thoughtful Iyad Rahwan: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Memory problems will change how you see the world...literally 👀

Across two new papers, we examined the eye movement patterns of younger adults, older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and amnesic cases.

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Using visual imagery to manipulate recognition memory for faces whose appearance has changed - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications Real-world recognition requires our memory system to accommodate perceptual changes that occur after encoding; for example, eyewitnesses must recognize perpetrators across changes in appearance. However, it is not clear how this flexible recognition ability can be improved: Standard encoding strategies not only tend to be ineffective, but can in fact be detrimental for recognizing people across appearance changes. Given the effectiveness of visual imagery in creating and modifying memory representations, we examined whether counterfactual visual imagery could be used to manipulate flexible recognition by simulating an increase in encoding–retrieval similarity. Across two experiments, participants (n = 317) encoded faces with neutral expressions and were cued to imagine the faces with either happy or angry expressions. During later retrieval, participants saw lineups of old and new faces with either happy or angry expressions, and selected the old face and provided recognition confidence. Old/new recognition discriminability and confidence were higher when a face’s expression at retrieval matched the expression that it was imagined in during encoding (i.e., congruent imagery); interestingly, however, there was Bayesian evidence for no benefit of imagery congruence for face-choice accuracy. Moreover, congruent imagery improved recognition for old arrays irrespective of whether participants correctly selected the old face, suggesting that the imagery manipulation influenced a diffuse sense of recognition without influencing the ability to attribute that sense of recognition to a specific stimulus. Together, these findings indicate that visual imagery can directionally manipulate recognition for changed faces and produces a novel dissociation between old/new recognition and forced-choice accuracy.

New paper out! Imagery can directionally modify memory encoding, to manipulate later recognition for changed faces. Essentially, imagery can be used to simulate effects of higher (or lower) study-test similarity for an item itself. @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...

fMRI_EPI_KspaceAcquisition_short This is a demonstration of how a single slice of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is collected. Before this makes any sense, you will need to understand…

Nice demo by Mark Lescroart @neuromdl.bsky.social on EPI imaging of a single #fMRI slice. Great for teaching! :)
vimeo.com/143701608?fl...

Love this article! We need more real-life memory studies.
Here is an example study and review from our lab…child development focus.

cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....

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

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of Al in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of Al, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.

🚨Our paper `Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science' is now forthcoming in the journal Computational Brain & Behaviour. (Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...)

Below a thread summary 🧵1/n

#metatheory #AGI #AIhype #cogsci #theoreticalpsych #criticalAIliteracy

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...

Ever wondered if your interesting brain-behavior correlation was over- or under-estimated due to head motion, but were afraid to ask? We’ve created a motion impact score for detecting spurious brain-behavior associations, now available in Nature Communications!
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

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

🚨🚨New precision imaging study and open dataset 🚨🚨 Featuring almost 200 functional runs acquired in 3-4d intervals and behavioral manipulations focused on intraindividual study of the reward response - The Night Owls Scan Club (NOSC) With @dvsmith.bsky.social and @olinotom.bsky.social!

Authors retract Science paper on controversial fMRI method Several MRI artifacts contribute to the neuronal activity signal picked up by the method, according to a preprint the authors posted this month.

A method for capturing neuronal activity using fMRI excited the neuroimaging field but couldn’t be replicated. Today, the authors of the original paper retracted their work.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/a...

Excited to share new work with @hleemasson.bsky.social , Ericka Wodka, Stewart Mostofsky and @lisik.bsky.social! We investigated how simultaneous vision and language signals are combined in the brain using naturalistic+controlled fMRI. Read the paper here: osf.io/b5p4n
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I am pleased to share that "the bird study" is now accepted at Psychology and Aging! A great collaboration with visiting intern Kishen Senziani, @leabartsch.bsky.social & @edamizrak.bsky.social 😀 Check out the pre-print below and a short thread on the study design and main takeaways 🧵👇