Shawn Schwartz

Linking student psychological orientation, engagement & learning in intro college-level data science

New work ‪‪at @cogscisociety.bsky.social w/ @erikbrockbank.bsky.social @shawnschwartz.bsky.social, C.Bryan, D.Yeager, C.Dweck & @judithfan.bsky.social

poster 8/1 @ 10:30
tinyurl.com/solds-cogsci25

A Temporal Hierarchy of Sustained Attention Dynamics journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Sinclair Lab The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair

Excited to share my new lab website!

The Learning & Behavior Change Lab will launch at Rice in July 2026. I’ll be recruiting over the next year! @ricesocsci.bsky.social

www.sinclairlab-rice.com

Thanks @chelseakisil.bsky.social, totally agree! Mindfulness is such a key piece of the puzzle. Excited to see how future research from our group and the field at large might help bridge the gap between the attention economy and meaningful ways to refocus and reengage students.

Thanks for the kind note about our paper @jeffgreene.bsky.social ! We have some emerging work that will be out soon addressing some of the points you raised. Happy to chat more if you’re interested.

The Open Science Room has been an exciting space at the OHBM Meeting for many years, but its future is threatened. Please sign this petition to signal your support for preserving a dedicated space for the OSR at future meetings. ohbm.github.io/osr2025/peti...

It was my pleasure @silicolabs.bsky.social!! 🫡 So fun!

Thanks @silicoky.bsky.social !! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts 😀

Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory - Shawn T. Schwartz, Haopei Yang, Alice M. Xue, Anthony D. Wagner, 2025 The ability to learn from and remember experiences (episodic memory) depends on multiple neurocognitive systems. In this article, we highlight recent advances i...

I’m excited to see where these new methods and ideas lead next! THE END. 🚀🧠

Full paper: doi.org/10.1177/09637214251339452

This review synthesizes recent work at the intersection of attention and episodic memory, highlighting a number of open questions and future directions.

We are grateful to our collaborators and the Stanford Memory Lab community for their contributions to the ideas discussed herein. 7/N

Innovative techniques for real-time closed-loop interventions on attention (and cognition more broadly). Real-time causal intervention studies require constructing and validating a robust (a, left) trial-by-trial pipeline to measure, clean, evaluate, and act on psychophysiological assays in real-time, which then can be used to manipulate the stimulus display, such as that for an (a, right) adaptive memory task with real-time attention tracking and reorienting. Example approaches for the real-time evaluation of psychophysiological assays of attention include (b, left) pupillometry (c, left; e.g., pupil-size dilation or constriction that surpasses a real-time adaptive baseline pupil threshold), (b, middle) scalp EEG (c, middle; e.g., elevated posterior alpha power), and (b, right) functional MRI (c, right; e.g., pattern-classifier decoding of attentional state).

Moreover, new closed-loop methodologies allow real-time monitoring of attention, enabling interventions that adaptively deliver memory probes during optimal attentional states.

We consider how wider adoption of these approaches can inform causal investigations of attention-memory interactions. 6/N

Example episodic memory precision task. Participants encounter (a, top) objects shaded in one of 360 possible colors. Participants then encounter (a, bottom) a grayscale version of previously encountered objects and indicate their memory for the color of the object by clicking the corresponding color on the wheel. Illustrative distributions of (b) memory precision errors are mapped from the circular space to the linear space of −180 to +180. Here, young adults (blue dashed line) are schematized to demonstrate higher memory precision than older adults (solid red line).

Memory precision — the fidelity of remembered details — tends to decline with age.

Recent advances in measurement techniques provide more sensitive ways to assess how attentional and memory processes change across the lifespan. 5/N

Three types of modeled or observed neural theta oscillations. The schematic shows (a) the SPEAR model of hippocampal theta, (b) neocortical theta power (which may or may not relate to theta oscillations in the frontoparietal cortex and/or hippocampus), and (c) theta-specific oscillations in reinstated (i.e., retrieved) episodic content (as quantified by pattern-classifier evidence in neural data). (SPEAR = separate phases of encoding and retrieval).

In fact, emerging work suggests that memory encoding and retrieval may be phase-dependent, aligning with hippocampal and/or neocortical theta oscillations.

We review evidence that memory performance can vary systematically with these rhythms. 4/N

But how are the temporal dynamics of attention related to whether and how we remember?

It turns out that attention fluctuates rhythmically⚡️, particularly in the theta (4–7 Hz) and alpha (8–12 Hz) ranges.

This raises the possibility that episodic memory behavior may also exhibit rhythmicity. 🤔 3/N

Assessing the influence of attention on memory retrieval. Shown in (a) are the frontoparietal networks of attention and cognitive control derived from network parcellations computed from the full sample (N = 1,000) in Yeo et al. (2011). (DAN = dorsal attention network; VAN = ventral attention network; CCN = cognitive control network).

Attention and episodic memory interact closely:

* Goal-directed (top-down) attention helps prioritize relevant information.

* Stimulus-driven (bottom-up) attention responds to salient events.

We discuss how these systems shape memory encoding and retrieval. 2/N

The schematic of the goal-directed memory-retrieval task used in Madore et al. (2020) shows (b) that pre-goal lapsing was measured using EEG posterior alpha power and pupil size in the last 1 s of the ITI, whereas goal-coding strength was measured using a retrieval goal-cue-locked ERP extracted from a midfrontal cluster of electrodes. In (c) the 1 second prior to the onset of the retrieval goal cue, pupil size (and posterior alpha power; not shown) significantly correlated with retrieval success, and midfrontal EEG goal-coding strength partially mediated this effect (n = 75; Madore et al., 2020).

How do different forms of attention, their neural mechanisms, and related cognitive control processes influence what we learn and remember?

Recent methodological and theoretical advances are offering new insights into the relationship between attention and episodic memory. 1/N

Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory - Shawn T. Schwartz, Haopei Yang, Alice M. Xue, Anthony D. Wagner, 2025 The ability to learn from and remember experiences (episodic memory) depends on multiple neurocognitive systems. In this article, we highlight recent advances i...

I’m pleased to share our new review article, “Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory”, written with Haopei Yang (HY), Alice Xue, and Anthony Wagner, now out in Current Directions in Psychological Science. 🚀🧠 A brief thread 🧵
doi.org/10.1177/09637214251339452

eyeris: A flexible, extensible, and reproducible pupillometry preprocessing framework in R https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.01.657312v1

eyeris: A flexible, extensible, and reproducible pupillometry preprocessing framework in R https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.01.657312v1

Thanks for resharing!!

Introducing a new tool from @tsbolt.bsky.social, find-viz (FMRI Interactive Navigation and Discovery Viewer)! It’s a browser-based visualization tool built with one purpose in mind: get researchers to spend more time looking at their fMRI data 🧠 @ohbmofficial.bsky.social @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social

I've already had two federal grants terminated and face a 33% pay cut due to future terminations. It's painful, but not as painful as the conversations I'm having every day with brilliant trainees in graduate school and postdoctoral positions who see little future for themselves in US science.

Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory: http://osf.io/yh3mg/

Collinearity...is orthogonalization the answer? (No) If I had a dollar for every time I read a paper purporting to have repaired a multicollinearity issue by orthogonalizing regressors...  Unfortunately, once collinearity is there and the data have been...

Are you tempted to orthogonalize the regressors in your fMRI model? @jeanette-mumford.bsky.social tells you why this is almost never a good idea, and is likely to wreck the interpretation of your model. mumfordbrainstats.tumblr.com/post/1337933...

Check it out! The future of Neurosynth.

We launched Neurosynth Compose: A free and open platform for neuroimaging meta-analysis. NS-Compose makes it easy to perform custom neuroimaging meta-analyses without leaving the browser.
It's live, check it out! compose.neurosynth.org

R-CMD-check fails on macos-latest (release); r-lib/actions/setup-r@v2 Hello. I'm having issues with My R-CMD-check on this package: Workflow runs · bmait101/hatchR · GitHub It only occurs on macos-latest (release) and not locally on my computer. or using when using de...

update: it's not just me: forum.posit.co/t/r-cmd-chec...

I want to draw attention to a special issue that Lila Davachi and I put together to memorialize our friend and colleague Sarah DuBrow. It’s full of papers inspired by her work and her being from a group of collaborators, friends, and fans! Thanks @bradpostle.bsky.social for helping make this happen.

is there something going on with homebrew? all os builds in my R package’s CI are passing except for macos…

Error: Failed to get R release: Failed to get R 4.4.2: Failed to install qpdf: Error: The process '/opt/homebrew/bin/brew' failed with exit code 1

If you are a Julia user you should be aware of this: yuri.is/not-julia/

Find your tribe: bsky-follow-finder.theo.io
This tool is really great!
#AcademicSky