Nina Rouhani

Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence - Nature Communications Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms
paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

🌵🏜️🌵 New preprint! How do people learn from ambiguous feedback, like whether someone is laughing *with* you 😆 or *at* you 😏? A very fun collab w/ the brilliant @rbhui.bsky.social A brief thread...👇

📖 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our latest paper, led by @yizhang96.bsky.social, finds Pavlovian learning shapes empathy:

People can link another person's abstract mental states—like feeling good or bad—with reward. This shapes empathy in new situations where those feelings are perceived.

Home | Social Connection Lab The Social Connection Lab ("SoCoLab") at USC investigates what helps people feel socially connected to one another.

🚨We are recruiting a lab manager who will spend 80% of their effort in my lab and 20% of their effort in @leorhackel.bsky.social's lab. Please share widely!

Apply at usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange... with:
completed questionnaire (socolab.org/lab-manager-application), CV & Cover Letter!

New paper led by @codydong.bsky.social now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, exploring the relationship between memory-augmented LLMs and human episodic memory – see Cody’s post below for a short thread and a non-paywalled paper link! #NeuroAI doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Come join us at UMD as an MRI Tech! Feel free to share wide if you know suitable candidates - great opportunity for new grads with a Bachelor's degree and an interest in MRI research.
umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UMCP/job/Uni...

Research Associate Screen reader users may encounter difficulty with this site. For assistance with applying, please contact hr-accessibleapplication@osu.edu. If you have questions while submitting an application, pleas...

I'm recruiting a lab manager for my soon-to-be-launched lab at Ohio State! If you know of any recent grads who may be interested both in helping to build the lab and in developing skills in the cognitive neuroscience of memory, please share!

osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/OSUCar...

Happy to announce that my lab @ Yale Psychology (actcompthink.org) will be accepting PhD applications this year (for start in Fall '26)!

Come for the fun experiments on human learning, memory, & skilled behavior, stay for the best 🍕 in the US.

Please reach out if you have any questions!

AI-guided digital intervention with physiological monitoring reduces intrusive memories after experimental trauma Trauma prevalence is vast globally. Evidence-based digital treatments can help, but most require human guidance. Human guides provide tailored instructions and responsiveness to internal cognitive sta...

I'm excited to share a new preprint! We built a digital, scalable intervention to reduce intrusive memories, combining an AI chatbot with LLM scoring of human-AI conversations and pupillometry predictors of effort and intervention success. I hope you enjoy! arxiv.org/abs/2507.01081

New press on our study linking the locus coeruleus to memory formation 🔵: newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/bra... .

“…at a time when legislation promises ‘big and beautiful change,’ it turns out one of the brain’s smallest players may have the biggest impact on how we understand and remember our lives.”

Sinclair Lab The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair

Excited to share my new lab website!

The Learning & Behavior Change Lab will launch at Rice in July 2026. I’ll be recruiting over the next year! @ricesocsci.bsky.social

www.sinclairlab-rice.com

Music is an incredibly powerful retrieval cue. What is the neural basis of music-evoked memory reactivation? And how does this reactivation relate to later memory for the retrieved events? In our new study, we used Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to find out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Perceived community alignment increases information sharing - Nature Communications Information sharing is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior. Here, the authors use neuroimaging and behavioral studies to show that people are driven to share information that they believe will be ...

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A neurocomputational account of motivated seeing Do goals, beliefs, and desires affect visual experience? This question has long been controversial in cognitive science. There exists extensive litera…

Excited to share our new review on how neuroimaging and computational models can help uncover how people see what they want to see, now out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! It was a blast writing this with Haena Kim and @iancballard.bsky.social

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

✨Thrilled to share that I’ve officially joined the Department of Psychology at UC Riverside @ucriverside.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor! My lab will study individual differences in perception and attention🔎 across the autism spectrum and across development. More info coming soon🌴

Opinion | The Moral Paralysis Facing Iranians Right Now

My new op-ed in the @nytimes.

I argue that Iranians are caught in a state of “moral paralysis,” a psychological trap set by the Islamic Republic itself. It pits two of our most sacred values against each other: liberation vs. self-determination. (1/2) www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/o...

N2 sleep promotes the occurrence of ‘aha’ moments in a perceptual insight task Sleep supports memory consolidation, but can it also facilitate memory reorganization? This study reveals that N2 sleep, but not N1 sleep during a nap, increases the likelihood of having an 'aha' mome...

Excited to share our latest work spearheaded by @anikaloewe.bsky.social & @maritpetzka.bsky.social. 20 min naps increased the chance to solve an insight task if sleep reached N2 stage; but the EEG spectral slope was the best predictor of insight dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
#compneuro #psychscisky

Seeking WV scientists! My dad (a non-scientist who works with scientists) is leading a FABBS delegation to discuss NIH funding with Senator Capito in August and needs to build the delegation. Please reach out and I’ll put you in touch with him! CC @standupforscience.bsky.social

congrats!! 🎉

Incredibly excited and grateful to share that I’ll be starting a lab at The Ohio State University this(!) fall! My lab will study human learning and memory, with related interests in sleep, stress, and time perception. More info soon, but do get in touch if you’re interested in joining!

Wrapping up #ica25 with @rzhprfshr.bsky.social presenting our work with @joebayer.bsky.social reviewing the research under the broad umbrella of “social connection”. And perfect timing because the paper was published TODAY at @natrevpsychol.nature.com 🥳 rdcu.be/erayE

I just signed the Bethesda Declaration and urge you to do the same today, so that we all stand with NIH researchers as Battacharya appears before the Senate Appropriations Committee tomorrow.

🙋‍♀️ 👋🚨 Two of my grad students had their NIH Diversity Supplements abruptly cancelled. We plan to appeal. We'd love to coordinate with other folks w/ cancelled grants. Does this already exist? If not, could we start a Slack, email or text thread, or shared Google Drive to share appeals & strategize?

Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations - Nature Human Behaviour Trach and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations.

Thrilled to share the new paper from the lab out today in
@nathumbehav.nature.com, led by the great @jetrach.bsky.social!

"Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations"

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

we think this work has potential implications for changes to reward-related systems in eating disorders as well as its detection & treatment - would be great to know your thoughts! (3/3)

an emotional arousal manipulation shifted these biases across individual differences in interceptive awareness (“IA”); people w/ low IA didn’t show a change across the manipulation whereas those w/ high IA did!

comp. models revealed pre-exp. values & learning rate changes predicted behavior (2/3)

Eating disorder symptoms and emotional arousal modulate food biases during reward learning in females - Nature Communications Disordered eating can disrupt the rewarding value of food. Here, the authors show in a female sample that eating disorder symptoms, emotional arousal, and interoceptive awareness modulate goal-ir...

new paper from a collaborative endeavor! (@co0p3r.bsky.social) we find & replicate food-reward biases in a reinforcement learning task (where food stim are incidental)

people with eating disorder symptoms show a low-calorie food bias while those without show a high-calorie food bias... (1/3)

Emotions create vivid and lasting memories - but how are those memories organized? We find that negative emotions fragment experience, disrupting the flow of memory. Reframing negative feelings also carves up experiences, but in a way that supports integration and wellbeing.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to share a new study from ACME Lab on how emotional processing shapes event segmentation! It shows that both negative stimuli and their down regulation impact how events are segmented in memory.
osf.io/preprints/psya…

🥳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