Marius Boeltzig

Such an amazingly active group, with so much curiosity and knowledge. It is so impressive that despite massive power and heating outages in Kyiv, so many people turn up to discuss memory. An inspiring reminder of how great science and learning are. Grateful to do this with @linniplidot.bsky.social

Day 1 focused on the cog-neuroscience of memory, with great talks by Mikael Johansson and Inês Bramão from @lund-memory-lab.bsky.social, followed today by great lectures on mental time travel (also in patients) by @scottcolepsych.bsky.social and on (in)voluntary retrieval by Krystian Barzykowski.

Just kicked off the Kyiv Winter School of Memory 2026 with over 70 participants of different universities in Ukraine. So rewarding to see this slightly crazy idea become a reality. Thanks to @linniplidot.bsky.social and Karine Malysheva (National University of Kyiv) for organising this with me.

So now, it is time to find out why. Thanks to @officialsarmac.bsky.social and especially the Diversity and Inclusion Committee for their assessment and making this study possible.

This will allow us to collect follow-up data on personal and collective future thinking in Ukraine, this time also including a sample of LGBTQ+ people. In a previous study (in preparation), we found that Ukrainians were MORE positive about their collective future than Germans and Poles!

Happy to belatedly share some good pre-Christmas news: My colleague Karine Malysheva from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and I secured a Collaborative Diversity and Inclusion grant from @officialsarmac.bsky.social.

I'm excited to share our new paper about initial prediction errors, which arise spontaneously at first exposure to coherent novel stimuli.

In this study we investigated the neural and mnemonic consequences of initial PEs compared to those of experimentally induced PEs.

doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

If there is an account on Bluesky that deserves way more followers, it is this one!

Frontiers | Analyzing Gaze and Hand Movement Patterns in Leader-Follower Interactions During a Time-Continuous Cooperative Manipulation Task In daily life, people often interact by taking on leader and follower roles. Unlike laboratory experiments, these interactions unfold naturally and continuou...

How do gaze patterns and hand movements differ between actors in naturalistic manipulation tasks when one person's action respond to the other's? New research from our lab, led by post-doc Anoush, using eye tracking and motion capture elucidates these processes. www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

I think part of it is that the philosophy "hits over time" is still very strong in Germany. Both her and Strelow seemed to prefer not to shoot if they cannot be sure that they will hit. Under most conditions, this leads to excellent hit rates - and now to two dreadfully slow range times...

We're now a team of 12 people in 8 countries, and preparing papers on future thinking (a bit of anticipatory clickbait: the results are genuinely stunning), Flashbulb Memories, and traumatic memories. More data collections are to come. Watch this space - and help Ukrainian defenders.

In a seminar, I had the chance to report how I started the collaboration with Ukrainian colleagues and how we collected data there. Weirdly, that story started in the russian city of Perm in 2013 - and the project somehow feels like the culmination of much of my adult life.

Once again, my admiration for Ukraine grew even more. It is inspiring to see how our colleagues have adapted to the situation and simply keep on doing their work - and how motivated they are to even make use of the situation to change the country and achieve stronger alignment with Europe.

We secured a grant from Lund University, allowing us to invite two collaborators, Karine Malyesheva and Illia Zarubin, from Taras Shevchenko University Kyiv for a week. Great discussions on future possibilities.
@mikael-johansson.bsky.social @linniplidot.bsky.social @lund-memory-lab.bsky.social

That was an exciting week with NAC (Natural and Artificial Cognition) and the SweCog (Swedish Cognition) conference in Lund!🤩

We had the opportunity to present our research on eye tracking and multi tasking, social inferences, how our brain extracts specifics and gist, and war memories in Ukraine.

The benefit of being wrong: How prediction error size guides the reshaping of episodic memories Episodic memories are not static – they shift and reshape as our surroundings evolve. One powerful mechanism for change are prediction errors, which a…

The less shouty version can be accessed here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It was great to present my poster on distinct encoding after large predictions errors at ICON last week. Thanks to all who passed by to have a chat (i.e., shouting at each other at the top of one‘s lungs).

(It's also the perfect summer read, as it is long enough to keep you busy even on more prolonged train rides)

A huge thanks to my co-authors (including @nliedtke.bsky.social, @ssiestrup.bsky.social, @moritzwurm.bsky.social, @schubotzlab.bsky.social) for their substantial contributions to this work.

You can read it in NeuroImage:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

4) Both prior precision (how strong the prediction is) and prior accuracy (how good the prediction is) uniquely contribute to these processes with different time profiles.

3) These effects are implemented by reinstatement of the original episode (used for prediction) during the new and mismatching input. The more reinstatement, the more distinct encoding.

1) Larger PEs promote detailed memories that are more neurally distinct from the memories that were used for the prediction.
2) Medium PEs lead to less distinct memories, negatively impacting recognition performance.

New Paper Out!

Why do some prediction errors (PEs) lead to changes in episodic memories and others do not?

Our new research supports the idea that the size of the episodic PE plays a crucial role in shaping mnemonic and neural outcomes.

These are the 4 most important results:

Looks really nice and seems very useful especially now that quite a few students think it's not worth bothering learning a programming language if ChatGPT can do it (and then end up not being able to trouble-shoot anything). Thanks for putting this together!

Congrats, looking forward to reading!

Presenting our work on future thinking and remembering around elections today at @sarmac2025.bsky.social - Session 7, 11:40 (my talk starts around 12:10) in Moore Abbey. Pass by if you’re around! @studentssarmac.bsky.social

It was great to present this work for the first time - and looking forward to doing this again at @officialsarmac.bsky.social in Ireland next week!

Marius @mariusboeltzig.bsky.social presented his poster on the influence of prediction error size on memory - showing that large prediction errors lead to distinct encoding of new episodes, while keeping old ones intact.

Finding the sweet spot of memory modification: An fMRI study on episodic prediction error strength and type Previous research has highlighted the critical role of prediction errors (PEs) in signaling the need to adapt memory representations in response to un…

The first paper of my PhD is out now in Neuroimage:

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

Great experience to present at @teap2025.bsky.social this year!