Chris Baldassano

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

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thank you to Ingrid Wickelgren and the team at Quanta for putting together this great piece, describing work by my lab and others on the neural representations of events

After years of work designing and running this study with a multi-University team, we have our first preprint 🎉🎉 showing how a memorization technique builds neural representations through conjunctive representations! See thread and preprint link ⬇️

Sculpting new visual categories into the human brain | PNAS Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report an alternate route for humans to a...

New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Awesome!! That final Fig 4 is especially cool.
I remember being a pilot subject for this when you were initially making the wiggly objects and it is amazing to see where it ended up.

🔔𝐍𝐄𝐖 𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐓🔔 Beyond excited to present our new work showcasing 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐝! Wait what? Exciting collab w/ @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/11)

Gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation may be linked through a common process that reinstates past experiences during memory retrieval! doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Check out our #Preprint that integrates eye tracking into the Sherlock fMRI Dataset! Postdoc work w/ @cibaker.bsky.social 🧠🟦 #PsychSciSky

Consolidation Enhances Sequential Multistep Anticipation but Diminishes Access to Perceptual Features - Hannah Tarder-Stoll, Christopher Baldassano, Mariam Aly, 2024 Many experiences unfold predictably over time. Memory for these temporal regularities enables anticipation of events multiple steps into the future. Because tem...

How does our ability to anticipate future events change with time and experience?

With memory consolidation, multistep anticipation becomes more efficient but less perceptually detailed.

Proud of Hannah Tarder-Stoll for this work with me & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

#PsychSciSky

Big year over here:
-Earned tenure
-Left tenured position for a job I love even more.
-Won a CAREER award from the NSF.
-First paper with undergraduate collaborator published in Open Mind.
-Finished* Visual Experience Dataset
-Published cool paper with @bjbalas.bsky.social.
*waiting on co-authors

At NeurIPS this week, led by Caroline Lee in collab w/ Haxby lab: we present the Hyper-HMM, to simultaneously align participants' spatial brain patterns (like hyperalignment) and temporal dynamics (with event segmentation), and align brain events to stimulus features!

www.dpmlab.org/papers/8510_...

Image of Figure 2 from the paper, showing that stimuli (moves in a board game called four-in-a-row) are generated based on both move probability from an AI model and participant predictions measured via eye movements.

New preprint led by @huangjiawen.bsky.social: we find that predictable stimuli are better remembered for two separate reasons: making correct predictions improves memory, and likely stimuli can be more easily reconstructed. We can independently manipulate these two factors!

osf.io/preprints/ps...