Ricardo J. Alejandro

Fantastic work led by @hayley-b-caldwell.bsky.social Hayley visited our lab in 2024, and I’m thrilled that the preprint from our project is now out

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.

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 episodic memory enables flexible decision-making.

In this Article, @jonathannicholas.bsky.social & @marcelomattar.bsky.social show that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future.

Illustration of the hypothesized flows of information between perception, memory and cognitive control in a conceptual model of working memory. Stimuli attributes are processed to varying degrees of abstraction and parts of these representations can be loaded into working memory under the guidance of cognitive control. Familiar stimuli such as the letter B activate visually abstract representations while less familiar stimuli are limited to sensory representations. Information can be shifted both up and down levels of the perceptual hierarchy to build either more or less abstract representations of either perceived or imagined stimuli. Working memories can be shifted into or out of the hierarchy as needed.

We recently published a theoretical review about how compositional and generative mechanisms in working memory provide a flexible engine for creative perception and imagery.

Pre-print:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Yeah! Let's get this year started off right.

A new theoretical model for everyone's favorite sensitive and specific neural marker.

So why is it a marker of goals if it is called the Reward Positivity? 1/4

My first, first-author paper on model-based planning in structured foraging environments is out now in Cognition!

Schematic depicting cortical-subcortical interactions during multi-task learning

Excited to see our paper with @mwcole.bsky.social finally out in peer-reviewed form @natcomms.nature.com! We examine how the human brain learns new tasks and optimizes representations over practice…1/n

Excited to share our preprint on variability in patch leaving decisions! Check out the 🧵 below

I’m excited to share my recent preprint on a neural network model of free recall that learns multiple memory strategies including the memory palace!

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

𝗔 𝗡𝗘𝗨𝗥𝗢𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗚𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟 𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗘𝗫
By Mars and Passingham
"Understanding anthropoid foraging challenges may thus contribute to our understanding of human cognition"
Going to the top of the reading list!
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#neuroskyence

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex links abstract planning to motor execution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.31.673392v1

Hippocampal mismatch signals are based on episodic memories and not schematic knowledge | PNAS Prediction errors drive learning by signaling mismatches between expectations and reality, but the neural systems supporting these computations rem...

We make predictions based on general knowledge and/or specific memories. Different brain areas are active when these distinct predictions are violated – and hippocampus selectively responds to prediction errors based on episodic memory.

Cool work by @chrismbird.bsky.social @ayab.bsky.social et al!

Awesome tip!

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world!

🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

Fantastic work by our (now former) lab manager Liv Christiano. We assess the test-retest reliability of OPM and compare it to fMRI and iEEG. 🧠📄🧵

🚨 We’re hiring a postdoc!
Join the FLARE project @cimcyc.bsky.social to study sudden perceptual learning using fMRI, RSA, and DNNs.
🧠 2 years, fully funded, flexible start
More info 👉 gonzalezgarcia.github.io/postdoc/

DMs or emails welcome! Please share!

Super excited to announce a follow-up to the Janelia 'mechanistic basis of foraging' conference - this time held in Birmingham, UK! Join us from the 3rd - 5th November to discuss all things foraging: uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

Model-based planning in structured foraging environments: https://osf.io/8z3qv

Fast-timescale hippocampal processes bridge between slowly unfurling neocortical states during memory search Prior behavioral work showed that event structure plays a key role in our ability to mentally search through memories of continuous naturalistic experience. We hypothesized that, neurally, this memory...

Excited to share our preprint "Fast-timescale hippocampal processes bridge between slowly unfurling neocortical states during memory search" 🧠✨ We leverage iEEG to elucidate the fast neural mechanisms by which long multimodal narratives are unfurled in continuous memory-search tinyurl.com/wjkr3dvf

Reinstatement of temporal context retrieves cognitive control demands: http://osf.io/qgfz6/

Episodic memory and the temporal dynamics of cognitive control: http://osf.io/9jr52/

How important are your #postdoc years in the likelihood of you staying & succeeding in #academia?

In our newly published paper in @pnas.org, "Postdoc Publications and Citations Link to Academic Retention and Faculty Success," we study the journey of #CareerSuccess of ~45,000 #postdocs.

🧵1/7

We have a new opening for a three-year postdoc position in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Ghent University: jobs.ugent.be/job/Ghent-Do...

Lesions of anterior cingulate cortex disrupt an electrophysiological signature of reward processing in humans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.04.626789v1

Rapid modulation in music supports attention in listeners with attentional difficulties - Communications Biology Rapid temporal modulation added to music affects attentional performance and brain activity; parametric manipulation of this added modulation reveals rates that differentially affect individuals with ...

Music helps attentional focus. I hope so. I'm not going to stop listening to music when I work.
Rapid modulation in music supports attention in listeners with attentional difficulties
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
#neuroscience

YouTube video by RANJIT "I don't wanna think too much" - Hikaru Nakamura

Just to give a hint on the potential for think aloud to answer these questions - this is my favorite chess streamer video - pretty nice evidence for model-based planning and model-free decision making from just one trial of data! www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zys...

Brain and eye movement dynamics track the transition from learning to memory-guided action This study reveals how the brain dynamically shifts from learning to memory-guided behavior. Büchel et al. use electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking in a spatiotemporal learning task to show a...

Proud of my first contribution to memory research: “Brain and eye movement dynamics track the transition from learning to memory-guided action” out in @currentbiology.bsky.social, great team effort together with Janina Klingspohr, Marcel Kehl & Bernhard Staresina.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Excited to have our Automated Research Assistant (AutoRA) published. While initially developed for the behavioral sciences, AutoRA is designed as a general framework for closed-loop scientific discovery. Visit the doc to construct your own closed-loop studies: autoresearch.github.io/autora/

This is intuition (inspired, e.g., by @suryaganguli.bsky.social on random projection theory) allowed us to show that if an animal performs the same task on different days, you can recover the same population dynamics even if you record from completely different neurons

tinyurl.com/5n7c6wvw