Chris Baldassano

The Places We Make Memories Help Us Inscribe Them Psychology researchers used virtual reality and MRI technology to better understand how locations help us encode memories.

Nice article from Columbia News on our new paper about neural representations of places and remembered items - including a video of the creative VR environment made by @xrmasiso.bsky.social ! news.columbia.edu/news/places-...

Great Q - here a "good" spatial representation is distinct from all others, but you'd also want some way of linking places into larger maps. We have some other projects now trying to understand how you could accomplish both of these things, e.g. for people's mental maps when using the Method of Loci

Our new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning

Columbia Psych is hiring *two* junior faculty in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience this year! If you work on cognition (broadly defined), submit your application materials as soon as possible (review starts Nov 1). If you have questions you can reach out to me by email! apply.interfolio.com/175428

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Years ago my lab tried to brainstorm ways to separately manipulate low-level (texture/pattern) and high-level (scene/object) image properties, for studying visual representations in the brain. Thanks to imaginative work by PhD student Zall Hirschstein, we now have a stimulus set that does just that!

What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !

Does watching a movie over and over make events slower or faster in the brain? With Narjes Al-Zahli and @mariamaly.bsky.social we find that different regions actually change in different directions, e.g. visual regions show finer-scale event structure and STS shows coarser-scale structure!

Out now: a unique multi-lab collaboration led by @matthiasnau.bsky.social showing that recalling a movie reactivates both neural and gaze patterns for sequences of scenes!

Check out the first paper from Halle’s lab: using a false-memory paradigm to challenge classical ideas about how memories are stored and change with age

Aging and false memories: Comparing effects of item-relatedness and list position Semantic false memories are traditionally more frequent from early list positions and thought to arise from presumed long-term memory stores whereas phonological false memories traditionally are more ...

I'm not a big poster, but had to share how proud I am of my postdoc, Lauri Gurguryan, for submitting the FIRST paper from my lab 🎉

Here, we ask a classic ? Do short- and long-term memory rely on separate or shared underlying stores

Checkout the preprint: bit.ly/3Hyyl83

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

How does the soundtrack of a movie change your memory of the story? New work led by @jayneuro.bsky.social finds that repeated musical motifs can reactivate neural patterns from earlier scenes, and reactivation is related to better subsequent memory!

Groundbreaking work by @martamasilva.bsky.social using intracranial recordings to study event boundaries and event memory, revealing neural mechanisms that we haven't been able to measure with fMRI!

Top-down attention shifts behavioral and neural event boundaries in narratives with overlapping event scripts De Soares et al. find that priming participants to attend to a schematic event script can change the way that a narrative stimulus is behaviorally and neurally segmented into perceptual events.

For more on this work, see:
Our paper in Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...
This feature in Quanta Magazine www.quantamagazine.org/how-event-sc...

Christopher Baldassano, Columbia University - The Brain Organizes Narratives Into Meaningful Event Memories - The Academic Minute How we experience an event may change how we remember it. Christopher Baldassano, associate professor of psychology at Columbia University, looks into our past experiences for clues. Christopher Balda...

My lab's research was featured on the public radio program The Academic Minute, who helped me put together a short summary of our recent work on shifting event boundaries in the brain! academicminute.org/christopher-...

🥳Excited to share that I am joining Columbia July 2025
@columbiauniversity.bsky.social

Looking for🚨lab managers🚨postdocs🚨grad students! Pls REPOST🙏

We study⭐️person perception⭐️social cognition using experimental, cross-cultural, & computational methods!

App👉shorturl.at/5UVPl
More👉shorturl.at/q18GM

I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026!
I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory!
RT appreciated!
(1/5)

What drives human curiosity? Is it a need to balance stimulation — or something we learn over time?

In our 🚨 new preprint, we show that learning reinforces curiosity, especially for related content.

osf.io/9bw6j_v2

w/ Jane Mok, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social , Caroline Marvin, Daphna Shohamy

🧵👇

This work was a true team effort, led by Caroline Lee in my lab with former lab members Samantha Cohen and Sam Hutchinson, in collaboration with Nim Tottenham and her lab!

On the contrary, kids who currently feel strong attachment to their caregivers may be processing these same narratives using a top-down approach where schema regions in the PFC are activated. There are even more results and cool methods in the paper, so check it out!

All in all, we think that kids with unstable caregiving histories may not have learned a stable (or what we would consider “standard”) attachment schema, so they’re activating episodic memory and visual processing regions when watching an attachment narrative.

Data figure comparing the schematic content of children's recalls based on whether they feel strong or weak attachment to their current caregivers. Children with weak attachment showed significantly greater similarity to the "Searching" schema event

We also looked at kids' verbal recalls of the movies! Interestingly, we found that recalls in kids who report weaker attachment are more focused on the Searching event in the attachment schema.

Brain map showing regions that are more connected to the amygdala for children with unstable early caregiving, including the hippocampus and lateral temporal regions

Looking at kids’ brain activity related to caregiver stability, we show that kids with unstable caregiver histories have more connectivity between the amygdala and visual processing regions + hippocampus.

Data figure showing that amygdala-vmPFC correlation is higher for children with strong attachment, while there is no significant effect on amygdala-dmPFC connectivity

Our results show that there are indeed differences in brain responses! Kids who report stronger attachment to their current caregiver(s) have more connectivity between the amygdala and vmPFC. Whole-brain results show that heightened amygdala connectivity also shows up in lateral frontal regions.

Figure showing how inter-subject correlation is computed. The average timecourse in the amygdala is computed in one half of the group, and the average timecourse in another brain region such as vmPFC or dmPFC is computed in the other half of the group, and then these two timecourses are correlated.

We compared brain responses to the movies based on childhood experiences: caregiver stability (caregiver switch/es vs no switch) and caregiver attachment (weak vs strong). We examined response patterns in the amygdala to other regions in the brain with ISFC (Inter-Subject Functional Connectivity).

Diagram showing the two videos used in the study (Homeward Bound and the Little Princess), and how each video proceeds through four events: "Together" (Characters are together at first, but say goodbye to each other), "Separation" (Characters miss each other because they are still separated), "Searching" (Character searches for other character), and "Reunion" (Characters are reunited and happy to be together again)

To understand whether childhood experiences such as changing caregivers (in the past) and attachment security (in the present) impact how kids view attachment narratives in movies, we had kids watch a short movie edited to depict 4 crucial events of an attachment schema while collecting fMRI.

Past and present caregiving experiences impact prefrontal connectivity and recall for attachment-schema narratives We investigated how past and current caregiving experiences impacted emotional event processing by examining inter-subject functional correlation in 7- to 15-year-olds during narrative movies depictin...

New preprint 🎉: How do episodic memory, emotions, and schemas for caregiver experiences come together in kids’ brains and verbal recall? Check out our new results showing how past and present childhood experiences shape perception and memory for movies: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Brain scans show areas that tend to activate when viewing art that is representational (left) vs abstract (right). (Credit: Piet Mondrian / Celia Durkin / Shohamy lab).

How does the brain respond to art? In a new @pnas.org study, by showing paintings to people while scanning their brains, Daphna Shohamy, Celia Durkin and colleagues provide a scientific test of a longstanding idea in art theory. Read:
zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/art-brain-be...
#neuroscience 🧠🎨

MDRS MDRS is a professional society dedicated to the study of memory. Members engage in basic and clinical research into how memory works and why it fails.

My favorite conference is the Memory Disorders Research Society meeting. It's a delightful community: top-notch research & wonderful people who have been so supportive in my career.

Want to join? Nominations for membership (including self-nominations) are open until April 9! Form at the top👇🏼

Symposium Talk - Cognitive Neuroscience Society March 29-April 1  |  2025 Submit a Symposium Submit a Poster Latest from Twitter

For anyone at #CNS2025 - check out @xrmasiso.bsky.social's talk tomorrow afternoon, showing that we can use fMRI to predict which (VR) locations will be good anchors for creating *future* memories!
www.cogneurosociety.org/talk/?id=5579