Our lab will be presenting at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference this year #CNS2026!
Learn more from our graduate students in their sessions! @catalinayang.bsky.social and @matthewdougherty.bsky.social

Decoding our memories: U of T researcher explores brain chemistry with new Connaught mid-career funding Katherine Duncan doesn’t experience memory the way most people do. She can’t vividly relive the past or picture it in her mind. That personal trait sparked a two-decade-long quest to understand why me...

“[It's] giving me the dedicated resources to focus in on this really exciting new research area, and take the calculated risks necessary to make new discoveries,” says @artsci.utoronto.ca Prof. Katherine Duncan. www.utoronto.ca/news/decodin...

MACK LAB IS PRESENTING AT CNS 2026! YONGZHEN (DORY) XIE, LINDA HE, & MICHAEL L. MACK Mnemonic effect of category exception learning as a function of prediction error type B71, SUNDAY, 8:00 - 10:00 AM LINDA HE & MICHAEL L. MACK Exploring the effects of self-generated and induced insight on incidental memory and pupil dilation B126, SUNDAY, 8:00 - 10:00 AM JESSIE SONG, FRIDA PRINTZLAU, SAGANA VIJAYARAJAH, DANA HUANG, STEPHANIE CARDILLO, MARGARET L. SCHLICHTING, & MICHAEL L. MACK Category learning in adults but not children benefits from delayed introduction of exceptions C51, SUNDAY, 5:00 - 7:00 PM SAGANA VIJAYARAJAH, MICHAEL L. MACK, & MARGARET L. SCHLICHTING Delaying exception introduction enhances children's hippocampal engagement during category learning C54, SUNDAY, 5:00 - 7:00 PM MADELINE BLOOMBERG & MICHAEL L. MACK Novelty-driven attentional shifts during concept learning D8, MONDAY, 8:00 - 10:00 AM

🧠 The MackLab (@drmack.bsky.social) will be presenting at #CNS2026! Stop by our posters to chat about learning, insight, and hippocampus!

New paper out from the Duncan Lab in Nature Human Behaviour! Congratulations to lead author Thomas Biba @tbiba.bsky.social for all his hard work through the peaks and troughs, seeing this through to publication!

Big thanks to our collaborators!
@lexidecker.bsky.social
@tvaliante.bsky.social

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 02 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02416-5Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz

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/

Our stellar graduate alum Dr. Alexandra Decker is looking for a Lab Manager for her lab, the Learning and Development lab@WashU! 🧠

If you are interested in attention, learning and memory in children and adults, this is the place to be.

See her posts for more details!
#Research #Psychology

Aging and episodic memory specificity: Evidence challenging a domain-general pattern separation decline Aging is associated with a decline in episodic memory specificity. This phenomenon has been observed across various memory tasks, such as the Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST), where older adults show a ...

We're thrilled to announce the publication of our newest paper in @plosone.org 🎉

"Aging and episodic memory specificity: Evidence challenging a domain-general pattern separation decline"

Read Dr. Youm's full paper here: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

@melaniecohn.bsky.social

#Memory #Psychology #Aging

Our graduate student @catalinayang.bsky.social shows that prediction errors only destabilize weakly reactivated memories. Strong memories? They are more impervious to surprise. Check out our #preprint with @barense.bsky.social to learn more osf.io/preprints/ps...

#UofT #Psychology

Using retrieval contingencies to understand memory integration and inference - Memory & Cognition Past work has yielded mixed insights into how people draw upon their memories to make new inferences. While some studies have shown memories can be combined during encoding to store never-experienced,...

Here is a link to our newest paper published with Wangjing Yu, Katherine Duncan and @megschlichting.bsky.social. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

On a roll: Recent familiarity primes the brain to retrieve other memories via dopaminergic nuclei mechanisms Memory retrieval is notoriously variable. Various neurocognitive states have been theorized to affect retrieval success from moment to moment, but the presence and catalysts of these states in the hum...

New preprint in the Duncan Lab
On a roll: Recent familiarity primes the brain to retrieve other memories via dopaminergic nuclei mechanisms

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

Come and check out recent Duncan Lab findings at CNS 2025!