Deepu Murty

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking:

Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods?

(alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz Nature Human Behaviour - Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠

The Contribution of Episodic Memory to Social Cognition Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience invites submissions to a collection on “The Contribution of Episodic Memory to Social Cognition”. Making decisions i

I’m excited to announce a special issue I am guest editing at SCAN with Johanna Jarcho and @maureenritchey.bsky.social on the intersection of memory and social cognition. Find more info here: academic.oup.com/scan/pages/c...

Changes in our feelings, or "affective surprise," may act as a learning signal that influences what we remember. Large magnitude deviations in experienced valence during encoding relate to better long-term associative memory.

But which one Chanel! Voyager? Hopefully not deep space 9.

It’s out!

A true scholar in all domains!

Unsolicited PSA: Asking your gay friend about Heated Rivalry may be a microaggression.

Btw I thought it was great but not excellant. Some of the romance felt undeserved.

My most controversial hot take yet.

I love old Bjork>>>>I love new Bjork>>>>>>I love New York

When giving feedback on a talk I came to a real truism: Seinfeld is for people that love New York, Friends is for people that love the idea of New York. I like Friends.

This pup found a stick shaped like an old timey pipe earlier today and has already solved three mysteries. 13/10

Reinforcement learning and it’s best. Please let the cat know partial reinforcement will lead to the greatest resistance to extinction.

Why is this the happiest news I have experienced in 5 years!!!!

First lesson of 2026 is that I can’t trim my mustache freehand.

This is on my top 10 list and i teach it in all my grad seminars. There is whole in the field without him :(

Novelty-facilitated extinction: providing a novel outcome in place of an expected threat diminishes recovery of defensive responses - PubMed These findings provide cross-species evidence of a novel strategy to enhance extinction that may have broad implications for how to override associative learning that has become maladaptive and offer a simple technique that could be straightforwardly adapted and implemented in clinical situations.

Love: A paper with humans and rodents doing analogous tasks.

Historic example: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25636175/

Did I say historic to make @joeydunsmoor.bsky.social feel old, 🤷🏾

We are excited to announce our partnership with @inclivio.com's software for #SAS2026.
We’re counting down to the conference with a series of posts.
Enter a drawing for 3 EMA study licenses by liking (1 point) and reposting (3 points)!
#SAS #AffectiveScience #EMA #EmotionDynamics

Agency alters memory organization during free recall - PubMed This study examined how agentic decisions in the absence of explicit rewards influence memory organization. Participants studied lists of items to assign as gifts to two characters-either choosing freely (Choice group) or following instructions (Fixed group). During free recall, participants in the …

Agency reorganizes memory around relevant decisions. This was collaboration the deeply missed Sarah DuBrow and steer-headed by our grad students @lindsayrait.bsky.social and Elizabeth Horwath.

p.s. the task design involves curating gift baskets.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41436249/

Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.

Love: my list of best friends 80% overlaps with my list of favorite collaborators.

Temporal memory is shaped by encoding stability and intervening item reactivation - PubMed Making sense of previous experience requires remembering the order in which events unfolded in time. Prior work has implicated the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe cortex in memory for temporal information associated with individual episodes. However, the processes involved in encoding and retri …

Finally time to share all the things I love about this field all of 2026.

Love: papers that have present an fMRI finding first that inspires a behavioral study to confirm a mechanism.

For example: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25319696/

Agree to disagree about best coast, but with this move it’s getting better coast 🤷🏾

Ok this may be a biased hot take, but I think the villain in stranger things is homophobia. But I also thought the same thing about K-pop Demon Hunters and Friends.

If only because of the richness of cable television in hotels I agree with this sentiment. I mean conferences are my main means of enjoying cable television in hotels.

Seeing a lot of fiction in academic Bluesky over the break. Here is a paragraph I like from Brandon Sanderson’s “Tress of the Emerald”:

Hate: Myself for getting old enough to think my hot takes matter. What a conundrum, because that is a hot take.

Follow your heart!

Alternative interpretation is maybe we should challenge the notion of a resting state attention network. This aligns pretty well with work showing a pretty porous boundary between reward, attention, and dopamine!

Truth, I may be using computational models as a straw man for limitations in the degrees of freedom a researcher can plausibly hold in their heads. But I also continue to hold space for the quarter century of neo-behaviorism inspired by RL models.