Qihong (Q) Lu

another great paper from @mh-christiansen.bsky.social, showing that non-constituents* can be primed

It's more evidence that traditional linguists were mistaken to believe memory was in short supply:
Human memory is compressed, clustered, implicit and vast

Misspecified models create the appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice - Communications Psychology In a new computational analysis of previous work, this study shows that a control-free mechanism better accounts for value-based decisions than an account that assumes top-down control invigorating th...

Final paper of my PhD 🤗

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making.

However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.

We are hiring a research specialist, to start this summer! This position would be a great fit for individuals looking to get more experience in computational and cognitive neuroscience research before applying to graduate school. #neurojobs Apply here: research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21503/r...

Does memory fade slowly, or in drops and bursts? We analyzed 728k tests from 210k people. Key finding: “stability” isn’t a trait you either have or don’t have - it’s often a time-limited state at different points in aging. Preprint "Punctuated Memory Change": 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congrats Jonathan! Excited to see these amazing results get published officially!

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

Fantastic thread and a must-read for anyone working on spatial cognition.

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.

What a privilege and a delight to work with @coltoncasto.bsky.social @ev_fedorenko and @neuranna
on this new speculative piece on What it means to understand language, nicely summarized in this
Tweeprint from @coltoncasto.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757

I am really proud that eLife have published this paper. It is a very nice paper, but you need to also read the reviews to understand why! 1/n

I'm going to present our latest memory model that learns causal inference during narrative comprehension! Stop by the poster on Monday to chat about causality, memory, brain🧠, and AI🤖!
#sfn2025 #sfn25

A RNN with episodic memory, trained on free recall, learned the memory palace strategy -- the network developed an abstract item index code so that it can “walk along” the same trajectory in the hidden state space to encode/retrieve item sequences!
Feedback appreciated!

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...

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

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

New landscape of the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease involves a drastic departure from the cognitive, functional, and behavioural trajectory of normal ageing, and is both a dreaded and highly prevalent cause of disability to individu...

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Latent learning: episodic memory complements parametric learning by enabling flexible reuse of experiences When do machine learning systems fail to generalize, and what mechanisms could improve their generalization? Here, we draw inspiration from cognitive science to argue that one weakness of machine lear...

Why does AI sometimes fail to generalize, and what might help? In a new paper (arxiv.org/abs/2509.16189), we highlight the latent learning gap — which unifies findings from language modeling to agent navigation — and suggest that episodic memory complements parametric learning to bridge it. Thread:

We present our new preprint titled "Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation". We quantify LLM hacking risk through systematic replication of 37 diverse computational social science annotation tasks. For these tasks, we use a combined set of 2,361 realistic hypotheses that researchers might test using these annotations. Then, we collect 13 million LLM annotations across plausible LLM configurations. These annotations feed into 1.4 million regressions testing the hypotheses. For a hypothesis with no true effect (ground truth $p > 0.05$), different LLM configurations yield conflicting conclusions. Checkmarks indicate correct statistical conclusions matching ground truth; crosses indicate LLM hacking -- incorrect conclusions due to annotation errors. Across all experiments, LLM hacking occurs in 31-50\% of cases even with highly capable models. Since minor configuration changes can flip scientific conclusions, from correct to incorrect, LLM hacking can be exploited to present anything as statistically significant.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**.

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

Our new lab for Human & Machine Intelligence is officially open at Princeton University!

Consider applying for a PhD or Postdoc position, either through Computer Science or Psychology. You can register interest on our new website lake-lab.github.io (1/2)

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia A new paper calls on academia to repel rampant AI in university departments and classrooms.

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia
www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/cognitive-...

Sensory Compression as a Unifying Principle for Action Chunking and Time Coding in the Brain The brain seamlessly transforms sensory information into precisely-timed movements, enabling us to type familiar words, play musical instruments, or perform complex motor routines with millisecond pre...

I'm excited to share that my new postdoctoral position is going so well that I submitted a new paper at the end of my first week! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A thread below

Key-value memory network can learn to represent event memories by their causal relations to support event cognition!
Congrats to @hayoungsong.bsky.social on this exciting paper! So fun to be involved!

Representations of stimulus features in the ventral hippocampus The ventral hippocampus (vHPC) controls emotional response to environmental cues, yet the mechanisms are unclear. Biane et al. examine how positive and negative experiences are encoded by vHPC ensembl...

Representations of stimulus features in the ventral hippocampus

🧠🟦

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Our new study (Titled: Memory Loves Company) asks whether working memory hold more when objects belong together.

And yes, when everyday objects are paired meaningfully (Bow-Arrow), people remember them better than when they’re unrelated (Glass-Arrow). (mini thread)

Now out in print at @jephpp.bsky.social ! doi.org/10.1037/xhp0...

Yu, X., Thakurdesai, S. P., & Xie, W. (2025). Associating everything with everything else, all at once: Semantic associations facilitate visual working memory formation for real-world objects. JEP:HPP.

What Emotions Really Are In this provocative contribution to the philosophy of science and mind, Paul E. Griffiths criticizes contemporary philosophy and psychology of emotion for failing to take in an evolutionary perspectiv...

Who else argues (in print) that we should eliminate the category of "emotion" as an explanatory target?

I know of Griffiths:
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

And Moors:
www.cambridge.org/core/books/d...

Longer fMRI brain scans boost reliability—but only to a point Around 30 minutes of imaging per person seems to be the “sweet spot” for linking functional connectivity differences to traits in an accurate and cost-effective way.

When powering fMRI studies, sample size is king, but scan duration can also be a powerful tool, improving phenotypic prediction and cost-efficiency, a new analysis shows

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/fmri/longer-...

Cortico-hippocampal interactions underlie schema-supported memory encoding in older adults

New paper led by @shenyanghuang.bsky.social!
academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

Older adults' memory benefits from richer semantic contexts. We found connectivity patterns supporting this semantic scaffolding.

Successful prediction of the future enhances encoding of the present.

I am so delighted that this work found a wonderful home at Open Mind. The peer review journey was a rollercoaster but it *greatly* improved the paper.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Episodic details are better remembered in plausible relative to implausible counterfactual simulations - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review People often engage in episodic counterfactual thinking, or mentally simulating how the experienced past might have been different from how it was. A commonly held view is that mentally simulating alt...

This was a fun paper to write, and one that fits nicely with some recent work I've been doing on the role of counterfactual simulation in memory encoding. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Attractor dynamics of working memory explain a concurrent evolution of stimulus-specific and decision-consistent biases in visual estimation People exhibit biases when perceiving features of the world, shaped by both external stimuli and prior decisions. By tracking behavioral, neural, and mechanistic markers of stimulus- and decision-rela...

Excited to share that our paper is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social (dlvr.it/TM9zJ8).

Our perception isn't a perfect mirror of the world. It's often biased by our expectations and beliefs. How do these biases unfold over time, and what shapes their trajectory? A summary thread. (1/13)