Ben Griffiths

Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

Hemispheric laterality of the putamen predicts pseudoneglect Healthy individuals tend to exhibit a subtle leftward attentional bias, a phenomenon termed pseudoneglect. While this bias is thought to reflect a right-hemisphere dominance when allocating spatial at...

🧠✨ Preprint alert!

Ever noticed how most people (without realizing it) tend to see the left side of space a bit more strongly? In our new study, we show that this subtle quirk—called pseudoneglect—is linked to the asymmetry of putamen, a deep subcortical structure.

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

Only a few days left to apply for this 3-year postdoc position in Nottingham (deadline Sept 5th!). If you're considering applying please get in touch. If you're already a PI, then repost this!

At long last, the pre-print to our MEG study + RIFT study and the final paper from my Ph.D with @olejensen.bsky.social We show that strong pre-search alpha oscillations are associated with faster responses in visual search www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
@thechbh.bsky.social #neuroskyence

Our new paper, “A neural compass in the human brain during naturalistic human navigation” is out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! First-author @zhenganglu.bsky.social led the charge, with Josh Julian and collaborator @gkaguirre.com.

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Theta-rhythmic attentional exploration of space Attention facilitates stimulus processing by selecting specific locations (spatial attention) or features (feature-based attention). It can be sustained on a given location or feature, or re-oriented ...

🚨New preprint from the Dugué Lab!

Happy to share our last work on #attention_rhythms, co-led by @cogsenoussi.bsky.social & former Dugué Lab PhD student @lauriegalas.bsky.social, and in collab with Niko Busch 🎉

@upcite.bsky.social | @erc.europa.eu | #neuroskyence

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

After you fall asleep in the sleep lab, we can decide what you dream about — as Karen Konkoly showed in her PhD work and just published in this new paper:
“Investigating dreams by strategically presenting sounds during REM sleep to reactivate waking experiences”
authors.elsevier.com/c/1lWFU6TBG5...

Excited to share our newly published paper! 👇 Massive thanks to @harrington-mo.bsky.social @sacairney.bsky.social @mggaskell.bsky.social

2 Lecturer (Assistant Prof) positions available @yorkpsychology.bsky.social! Come join our department!

#neuroskyence #cognition #psychscisky #neurojobs

jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...

Movie-watching evokes ripple-like activity within events and at event boundaries Nature Communications - The neural processes involved in memory formation for realistic experiences remain poorly understood. Here, the authors found that ripple-like activity in the human...

🧠 Paper out!

We investigated how hippocampal and cortical ripples support memory during movie watching. We found that:

🎬 Hippocampal ripples mark event boundaries
🧩 Cortical ripples predict later recall

Ripples may help transform real-life experiences into lasting memories!

rdcu.be/eui9l

Research Associate in Cognitive Neuroscience:Manchester

🚨 NEW postdoc position 🚨 Join our Royal Society-funded team (3+ years) to work on human memory and salience 🧠 with virtual reality, fMRI, computational modelling and clinical collaborations
👉 www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...
Please spread the word! 📣

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social.

Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

preprint alert 🚨
1/ Can we accurately detect sequential replay in humans using Temporally Delayed Linear Modelling (#TDLM)? In our recent study, we could not find any replay and decided to dig deeper by running a hybrid simulation with surprising results. Link to preprint & details below 👇

As you listen to a story, the meaning of each word you hear relates to the meaning of prior words. But how? We operationalized semantic distance, and identified brain regions that correspond to this rolling summary measure during naturalistic listening. #neuroscienceoflanguage

Finally out in @commsbio.nature.com !
Using MEG and Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT) in a classic visual search paradigm we show that neuronal excitability in V1 is modulated in line with a priority-map-based mechanism to boost targets and suppress distractors!

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/...

Just over a week left to apply for these roles! Postdoc is for 3 years with a possible extension to 5. RA is for 2 years and ideal experience for securing a PhD studentship.

Been told to expect a big grant decision “in June”, so naturally the next four weeks of my life will consist of refreshing my inbox every ten minutes.

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...

Super excited that the first article from my PhD research has now been reviewed and recommended by @pci-regreports.bsky.social and is available to read at osf.io/preprints/os...!

This Thursday at 5.20pm we are holding a webinar to reveal the first findings from our project studying how 100 people explore, navigate and evacuate space. Photos below show camera tracking at 2 timepoints in our experiment.

For more info and a registration link:

www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/res...

Cholinergic blockade reveals role for human hippocampal theta in encoding but not retrieval Cholinergic dysfunction is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease and other memory disorders. Yet, the neurophysiological mechanisms linking cholinergic signaling to memory remain poorly understood. In thi...

Hi Bluesky! First post here. Kicking things off with a new preprint.

🧠 Using human iEEG + pharmacology, we asked: is hippocampal theta required for retrieval?

Turns out it’s not. Instead, it may reflect a reinstated encoding mode.

Thread below.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’m looking for a postdoc and RA for an ERC-funded project “SLEEPAWAY: Forgetting unwanted memories in sleep”. You’ll use MEG/EEG and fMRI to understand how the sleeping brain remembers and forgets. PLEASE REPOST 😊

Postdoc: tinyurl.com/vr5thp7s
RA: tinyurl.com/ycyzkatc

1/2 Just like social groups, human memory is organized in interconnected patterns. Activating one memory can trigger related ones, similar to how information spreads through a community. Could social sharing shape how memories are formed?

#PsychSciSky

Evolving Engrams Demand Changes in Effective Cues A longstanding principle in episodic memory research, known as the encoding specificity hypothesis, holds that an effective retrieval cue should closely match the original encoding conditions. This p...

New paper out! 🎉 “Evolving Engrams Demand Changes in Effective Cues” (Hippocampus). In this opinion piece, we discuss how retrieval processes can be enhanced and offer an alternative to one of the field’s few enduring principles: encoding specificity. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Closed-loop control of theta oscillations enhances human hippocampal network connectivity Nature Communications - Closed-loop brain stimulation of the human hippocampal theta rhythm produces lasting enhancement of network communication. This implicates theta rhythms in human hippocampal...

Major team effort on phase-locked stim of human hippocampal theta rhythms finally out in the wild! W/ @jkragel.bsky.social @alikwidge.bsky.social and a cast of many. Thanks to the BRAIN Initiative for making it possible.
rdcu.be/ej7VE

🧠✨How do we rebuild our memories? In our new study, we show that hippocampal ripples kickstart a coordinated expansion of cortical activity that helps reconstruct past experiences.

We recorded iEEG from patients during memory retrieval... and found something really cool 👇(thread)

Very excited to share the first preprint of my PhD thesis!

Together with @tschreiner.bsky.social, we investigated how respiration coordinates signature neural expressions of successful remembering during memory retrieval. 🫁🧠

🧵(1/8)

Traveling waves in the human visual cortex: An MEG-EEG model-based approach Author summary Brain oscillations, thought to be crucial for many cognitive processes, might actually be waves that travel across the brain’s surface. Understanding these traveling waves is notoriousl...

🚨New article from the #DuguéLab in #PLOS_Computational_Biology, led by @lgrabot.bsky.social! We developed a new model-based neuroimaging approach to study Traveling Waves in visual cortex using MEG-EEG.
@erc.europa.eu

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Learning and language in the unconscious human hippocampus Consciousness is a fundamental component of cognition, but the degree to which higher-order perception relies on it remains disputed. Here we demonstrate the persistence of learning, semantic processi...

New paper from the Neurosurgery Research Team at BCM! "Learning and language in the unconscious human hippocampus"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...