Matthew Logie

YouTube video by Quanta Magazine Is Information a Fundamental Force of the Universe?

Bob Hazen and I yap about science, information, and complexity.

Thanks to @quantamagazine.bsky.social for the spotlight!

The Effects of External Cue Overlap and Internal Goals on Selective Memory Retrieval as Revealed by Electroencephalographic (EEG) Neural Pattern Reinstatement This EEG study used multivariate decoding in humans to investigate how memories are selected when retrieval goals vary. The results showed that EEG neural patterns reinstating studied information tra...

🚨Paper now published! 🚨

The Effects of External Cue Overlap and Internal Goals on Selective Memory Retrieval.

Grateful for thorough reviews that made it stronger. Out now in #EJN: doi.org/10.1111/ejn..... w @alexamorcom.bsky.social @MattPlummer @ivorsimpson.bsky.social. Updated summary🧵👇

captain america is holding a hammer and says avengers assemble Alt: Captain America holding Mjölnir and says: “Avengers… Assemble!”

Mixed-effects modellers, assemble!

Just dropped a (very niche) blog on the weird quirks that occur with uncorrelated random effects and the trifecta of packages: lme4, afex, and performance (in R).

Read here 👉 sites.google.com/view/jamieco...

#rstats #MixedModels #lme4 #afex #performanceR

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

7 days. That’s all you’ve got left to shine a light on someone doing exceptional neuroscience work!
Nominate them now before the window closes!
📌 Nominations close 10 August
🎯 Final push. Tag, share, submit.
📥 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🚨 New preprint alert!

Excited to share our latest work on alpha/beta activity, eye movements, and memory.

Across 4 experiments combining scalp EEG/iEEG with eye tracking, we show that alpha/beta activity directly reflects eye movements, and only indirectly relates to memory.

👇 Highlights (1/7):

YouTube video by Future of Intelligence The Margaret Boden Lecture - Lecture One by Professor Margaret Boden (Sussex)

Inaugural Lecture of the Margaret Boden Lecture series at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNr2...

Albert Camus to René Char (1957)
Camus-Char: Correspondence 1946-1959

1/4
New paper in @pnas.org! How does stress affect our social decisions in conflict? More aggression (fight-or-flight)? Or more altruism (tend-and-befriend)? Our new study suggests: it’s not either/or, stress promotes both at once, depending on the neurochemical balance and the social context. 🧠

Our oscillations consensus paper is finally out as a preprint 🤩 thanks to everyone involved
arxiv.org/abs/2507.15639

🔓 Boeltzig, M., Liedtke, N., Siestrup, S., Mecklenbrauck, F., Wurm, M. F., Bramão, I., & Schubotz, R. I. (2025). The benefit of being wrong: How prediction error size guides the reshaping of episodic memories. NeuroImage, 317, 121375. doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Time Warped: How Repetition Distorts Our Sense of Duration Podcast: This guest's research uncovers a surprising illusion: Repeated experiences, which are more vividly remembered, are often perceived as having occurred further in the past than they did.

In the latest #UndertheCortex, @brynnsherman.bsky.social from @upenn.edu shares that repeated experiences are more vividly remembered and are often perceived as having occurred further in the past than they did.

Prediction error is out of context: The dominance of contextual stability in structuring episodic memories - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Our everyday experiences unfold continuously, yet we segment them into distinct memory units—a phenomenon known as event segmentation. Although extensively studied, the underlying mechanisms of event ...

New paper alert🚀
Episodic memory is structured by event boundaries—moments of critical change. The common view suggests that prediction errors drive them—but is that true? We show that contextual stability, not prediction errors, is the key driver of segmentation.
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Our new paper out now in Science explores how neural activity in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) *drifts* over time - and *jumps* at key boundaries - to help organize events in memory.

🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here's a quick summary of what we found 🧵👇

📢 now out @natrevpsychol.nature.com In a new perspective w/ @davidnagy.bsky.social & @gergoorban.bsky.social, we reconcile a glaring problem in applying rate-distortion theory as a framework for human memory, integrating empirical findings across a host of human memory research 🧵👇

Thoroughly enjoyed your talk and subsequent discussions @aidanhorner.bsky.social

Plenty of discussions to be had about complex events!

Looking forward to your talk.

On the train to Paris to give a talk tomorrow at Neurospin. Looking forward to meeting everyone there. Thanks for the invite @herbstso.bsky.social & @matthewrlogie.bsky.social!

Proud to share the first preprint of my PhD w/ @barense.bsky.social & Mursal Jahed:

“Putting the testing effect to the test in the wild: Retrieval enhances real-world memories and promotes their semantic integration while preserving episodic integrity”

See thread! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

How do we make friends? 🤝

ERC Advanced grant recipient @antoniahamilton.bsky.social and her team at @ucl.ac.uk‬ will study how synchrony & shared tasks can help us bond and improve our well-being.

Find out more👉 buff.ly/R6abUn2

#ERCAdG #FrontierResearch #SyncShareBondModel #Neuroscience

New paper: "Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective" (D. Krakauer, J. Krakauer, M. Mitchell).

We look at claims of "emergent capabilities" & "emergent intelligence" in LLMs from the perspective of what emergence means in complexity science.

arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

A Temporal Hierarchy of Sustained Attention Dynamics
journals.sagepub.com/share/YUQSMC...

Trends in Cognitive Sciences Review Core systems of music perception Samuel A. Mehr 1 ,2 , * 1 School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Human musicality is supported by two distinct systems of representation: one for tonal perception, which contextualizes pitch input in reference to a hierarchy of tones; and one for metrical perception, which contextualizes temporal input in reference to a hierarchy of rhythmic groupings. Growing evidence suggests that the two systems are universal, automatic, encapsulated, and relatively early-developing. But like speech perception, and unlike several other perceptual systems, they appear to be uniquely human. The systems of tonal and metrical perception form a foundational structure for musicality that, when combined with the processing of other acoustical information (e.g., timbre or auditory scenes), and applied in conjunction with other cognitive domains, yields a human psychology of music.

my latest, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm

or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...

How strong is the rhythm of perception? A registered replication of Hickok et al. (2015) | Royal Society Open Science Our ability to predict upcoming events is a fundamental component of human cognition. One way in which we do so is by exploiting temporal regularities in sensory signals: the ticking of a clock, falli...

Once upon a time I couldn't replicate a published finding...and decided to do something about it.

Little did I know how long it would take to finish 😭...but here we are. I'm super proud of this paper and grateful to the other 68 (!) authors. ❤️

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

"Large [language] models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated." henryfarrell.net/wp-content/u...

What does it mean to relive an experience through remembering? Francesca Righetti (Ruhr University Bochum)

Episodic remembering comes with a complex phenomenology. How can we account for it? Which methodology is best suited to study it? Today, Francesca Righetti (Ruhr University Bochum) shares some very interesting ideas about these questions.
open.substack.com/pub/thememor...

A warning:

"Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems."

For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time | Quanta Magazine One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science

Time and memory determine the value of any algorithm. In February, the computer scientist Ryan Williams proved that a small amount of memory will always be as useful as a large amount of computing time.

@benbenbrubaker.bsky.social‬ reports: www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorith...

Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it.

We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories.

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