Jiawen Huang

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...

10.04.2025 13:47 — 👍 26    🔁 9    💬 1    📌 0

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

22.02.2025 12:53 — 👍 32    🔁 10    💬 0    📌 0

Overall, these results highlight the importance of conjunctive representation as a “glue” in successfully binding novel items to schematic scaffolds.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

We found that over the course of the training, story deviation increased and that the amount of neural conjunctive representation in DMN also tracked the amount of semantic conjunctive representation.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

We also used a language model to compute how similar the story people came up with is from just the locus-item pair (“story deviation”), where higher story deviation means people added more novel details to the locus-item pair - a measure of semantic conjunctive representation.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

In these DMN regions, the amount of neural conjunctive representation increased as participants gained more experience over the course of training.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

We found that the conjunctive part of encoding representation is robustly and consistently reinstated during retrieval throughout the neocortex, especially in the DMN regions, much more than the locus- and item- alone representations.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

We looked at the conjunctive part of the encoding representation that is not explained by a linear combination of locus and item representation (“encoding residual”), and used it (along with the locus- and item- alone representations) to predict retrieval representation.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

We scanned participants three times through the course of the training, and we measured the neural representations of the items and the loci individually, and their combined representations during memory encoding and retrieval.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

This strategy for forming strong memories involves pre-learning an imagined path through a sequence of anchors (loci) and then creating a meaningful association between each word in a list and a corresponding anchor.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

but the neural mechanism of how novel items are combined with familiar context remains relatively unexplored. Here, we present a new experimental and analytic paradigm for studying this process of item-context binding, by training participants on the Method of Loci (MoL) over a course of 4 weeks.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

In daily life, we can draw on schemas, or structured prior knowledge, to provide a scaffold for remembering a novel event. Decades of behavioral and neuroimaging work on how contexts help memory highlighted the importance of creating meaningful connection between the novel items and the context.

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Binding items to contexts through conjunctive neural representations with the Method of Loci Schematic prior knowledge can provide a powerful scaffold for episodic memories, yet the neural mechanisms underlying this scaffolding process are still poorly understood. A crucial step of the scaffo...

New preprint with Akshay Manglik, Nick Dutra, Hannah Tarder-Stoll, @tchamberlain.bsky.social, Robert Ajemian, @qiongzhang.bsky.social, @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social looking at conjunctive representation during Method of Loci! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

27.01.2025 16:51 — 👍 9    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 2

@huangjiawen.bsky.social, craig poskanzer, @raheemajavid.bsky.social, and @hartwakeland.bsky.social stand in front of a poster that reads: “CNS 2024 Toronto” “Welcome to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting”

@raheemajavid.bsky.social, @hartwakeland.bsky.social, craig poskanzer, and @huangjiawen.bsky.social stand in front of the CN Tower

that’s a wrap on CNS2024! 🇨🇦

had the best time with the most amazing group of people that i get to work with! @huangjiawen.bsky.social @hartwakeland.bsky.social @craig_poskanzer

18.04.2024 00:15 — 👍 3    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

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...

15.12.2023 15:17 — 👍 23    🔁 9    💬 1    📌 0

Hippocampal differentiation of competing memories predicts the precision of preparatory coding in vi... bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

How do we resolve competition between memories to behave adaptively?

Hippocampal differentiation of competing memories predicts the precision of preparatory coding in visual cortex during memory-guided attention

Excited to share this work by the inimitable Serra Favila!

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

11.10.2023 12:54 — 👍 46    🔁 23    💬 1    📌 0