Monica Rosenberg

HUGE congratulations to all the brilliant winners & especially to @esfinn.bsky.social & @ycleong.bsky.social for leading absolutely transformational work & being all around good people & friends.

An exciting new Special Issue on Diffusion MRI at Imaging Neuroscience!
direct.mit.edu/collection/7...

New Special Issue at @imagingneurosci.bsky.social! direct.mit.edu/collection/7... 🧲

I'm going to present our latest memory model that learns causal inference during narrative comprehension! Stop by the poster on Monday to chat about causality, memory, brain🧠, and AI🤖!
#sfn2025 #sfn25

Interested in how the brain prepares for upcoming tasks? We trained a monkey on “6” different cognitive tasks and recorded prefrontal cortical activity. We examined the neural geometry and dynamics during task preparation. Come check out our poster on SUNDAY(Nov 16) from 1-5 PM!

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

@hayoungsong.bsky.social has new modeling work explaining these effects! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hidden Markov Models
Speaking of HMMs, really enjoyed this paper on dynamics underlying resting state and other conditions. The idea of a baseline state from which excursions lead to more integrated states is really interesting.
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
#neuroskyence

Representation of goal activation in working memory as a function of participant motivation. According to the goal competition hypothesis, goal activation in working memory is influenced not only by cognitive control but also by the level of associated benefits. A goal with little or no benefit (neutral) will be weakly activated in working memory compared to conditions involving incentives (penalty avoidance, reward seeking, or the combination of both). It can be assumed that the combination of reward and penalty leads to stronger goal activation than penalty alone, potentially explaining the higher number of no-go errors observed in the penalty-only condition.

1/ To reduce distraction and boost focus, nothing works better than linking performance to rewards 💰 But what about focusing to avoid penalties? Turns out — it works too… just not as much as combining both!

Check out our new preprint 👇
w/ Ed Vogel and @monicarosenb.bsky.social

Thank you Taraz, that is so kind!!

Thank you Rod! 🙏

:)) thanks Laurel!

Thank you so much Dylan!

🏆 #CNS2026 Young Investigator Award Winners 🏆

Congratulations to Monica Rosenberg and Samuel D. McDougle, recipients of the 2026 Young Investigator Award! 🎉

We look forward to their award lectures at the CNS 2026 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada! 🇨🇦✨

@cogneuronews.bsky.social

Thank you!!

🙏🙏

maybe a slide swap?!

Thank you!!! So grateful :)

😅

1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.

Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date.

We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400.

Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

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

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

Resting-state fMRI data predicts what people are thinking and how they're thinking it ⬇️

what happens during "resting state"? @jinke.bsky.social asked this question by (literally) asking what participants what they were thinking during rest, finding that ongoing thoughts are reflected in FC patterns and predict behavior/traits!

excited to be part of this project!

Ongoing thoughts at rest reflect functional brain organization and behavior Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC)-brain connectivity observed when people rest with no external tasks-predicts individual differences in behavior. Yet, rest is not idle; it involves streams...

New preprint! 🧠

Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10).
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

Preprint⭐
Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My first time presenting this line of work, linking environmental exposures, attention problems, and attention-related brain networks in the ABCD Study at the MSTP retreat! Thank you to my collaborators for your support!@monicarosenb.bsky.social @ariellekeller.bsky.social and others not on bluesky.

Searching for a postdoc to work on 2 newly NIH-funded projects using intracranial EEG with TMS and direct electrical stimulation to investigate hippocampal networks supporting episodic memory. Research Scientist could also work for post-post-doc candidates. Plz spread!
cnoir.bsd.uchicago.edu/join/

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...

Pharmacological manipulations offer unique, powerful & imo underutilized ways to test the sensitivity & specificity of brain-based biomarkers of behavior. New from an amazing team led by @lyulouisa.bsky.social & @annacorriveau.bsky.social

Predicting whole-brain neural dynamics from prefrontal cortex fNIRS signal during movie-watching Abstract. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) offers a portable, cost-effective alternative to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for n

Now out in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN)! academic.oup.com/scan/advance...