Mariam Aly

Where you look next isn’t arbitrary.
In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵

Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects Abstract. Visual working memory is a core cognitive function that allows active storage of task-relevant visual information. Contrary to the common assumption that the capacity of this system is fixed...

New paper with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JoCN! "Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects" doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

New preprint out 🎉

What happens to the hippocampal “place code” when an animal is actively engaged in a task?

The answer surprised us (and might surprise you too!).

Let's dive in ⬇️

Link:
"Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.17.706430v1

Rejection-based choices discourage people from opting out of voting - Nature Communications When people dislike their options for candidates, they tend to refrain from voting rather than voting for the candidate they like best. Here, the authors show that this tendency to opt out of lose-los...

Excited to share my first PhD paper with @ashenhav.bsky.social
@shenhavlab.bsky.social
“Rejection-based choices discourage people from opting out of voting.”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What episodic memory reveals about the default mode network osf.io/preprints/ps...

Adaptive episodic memory: how multiple memory representations drive behavior in humans and nonhumans | Physiological Reviews | American Physiological Society Episodic memory is a declarative long-term memory of a specific past experience. As such, it is multifaceted, encompassing both the objective and subjective components of that experience. These components can be flexibly represented at different levels of granularity, from precise, context-specific details to generalized, gistlike representations. In this review, we suggest that 1) multiple representations of an episodic memory at different levels of granularity are simultaneously encoded into a memory trace and 2) the relative weighting of these representations determines the extent to which a memory is reconstructed or reproduced at retrieval. We propose that this representational flexibility drives adaptive behavior by prioritizing reconstruction or reproduction depending on the age of the memory, its relationship to prior knowledge, current attentional goals or task demands, and individual differences. Drawing on research in humans and nonhuman animals, we show a close correspondence between psychological and neural representations of a memory across encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Specifically, we discuss how hippocampal activity in humans and engram formation and activation in rodents support the reproduction of detailed memory representations, whereas schema formation across species, mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex, facilitates reconstruction and generalization to guide behavior. Finally, we consider how species- and individual-level differences shape episodic memory representations. By integrating findings across species, we illustrate how the correspondence between neural and psychological representations enables multiple memory representations to balance stability and flexibility, ultimately driving adaptive behavior.

How do memories guide behaviour?

Multiple memory representations, from detailed to gist-like, let us flexibly reconstruct or reproduce past experiences to behave adaptively across species.

Now out in Physiological Reviews with Morris Moscovitch, Melanie Sekeres & @brianlevine.bsky.social!

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal!
Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵(1/6)

Read the Save HHS open letter!

www.savehhs.org/letter-we-wi...

DHS funding bill faces new Senate hurdles after another person killed in Minneapolis Some Democrats who voted for recent funding bills said they'll vote against any DHS bill without restrictions on enforcement operations. The deadline to avert a shutdown is Friday.

YOUR PHONE CALLS TO THE SENATE ARE WORKING. KEEP CALLING.

202–224-3121

Three Democrats who previously broke with the party and voted with the GOP are now saying they will not vote for the bill. That’s enough for the bill to be unpassable right now.

Tell the Senate: Not a penny more for ICE brutality | Indivisible

Indivisible has a tool here with a call script:

indivisible.org/actions/ice-...

Misspecified models create the appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice - Communications Psychology In a new computational analysis of previous work, this study shows that a control-free mechanism better accounts for value-based decisions than an account that assumes top-down control invigorating th...

In a new computational analysis of previous work, this study shows that a control-free mechanism better accounts for value-based decisions than an account that assumes top-down control invigorating the best choice.
@hritz.bsky.social @ashenhav.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

At @elife.bsky.social you can now include explainer videos with every figure. Like going to a seminar while you engage with the paper. First example here elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Click the arrows next to each figure to get a video of @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social explaining it for you!

Thanks again for writing this incisive and thought-provoking piece, and for the interesting conversations about how we both think about our data! I'm excited to continue to work together to figure out at least some of this puzzle 👏🏼😊

How Prediction of the Future Affects Encoding of the Present: Cooperation or Competition? Abstract. Each day brings new experiences and the opportunity to form new episodic memories. However, our everyday experiences are not isolated episodes; rather, there is significant spatial and tempo...

In a new paper, I delve into these two findings and muse on when prediction might help vs. hurt memory (and discuss why this matters for models of memory and the hippocampus). This is my first solo-author paper, and I had a lot of fun putting these ideas on paper! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

We can use past experience to make predictions about the future. How do predictions affect our memory for the present? My own work (tinyurl.com/42kyukch) suggests that predictions compete with memory. But other recent work (tinyurl.com/2ekd4wr6) found the opposite--cooperation! What's going on here?

NSF building on Eisenhower Av. HUD now owns.

Destroying the NSF mural in the foyer. Of the Eisenhower building.

The National Science Foundation sign on our Eisenhower Av building is now gone.

The NSF mural in the foyer is removed and torn off in sheets.

We were supposed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the agency in May 2025. That never happened.

How do hippocampal pathways contribute to learning regularities and exceptions?

To answer this, Melisa Gumus & @drmack.bsky.social use diffusion imaging to identify the endpoints of different hippocampal pathways, and then analyze functional activity within those "footprints". Super innovative!

Can reward improve memory for what came before it? 🌟

In a registered report with @duncanlabuoft.bsky.social & @megschlichting.bsky.social, we reconcile mixed findings from past studies: reward retroactively boosts associative—but not item—memory, and only in reward-sensitive individuals!

Predictive coding of reward in the hippocampus - Nature Calcium imaging of mouse hippocampal neurons while mice learn a reward-based task over several weeks provides insight into the evolution of the hippocampal reward representation during extended periods of experience.

Nature research paper: Predictive coding of reward in the hippocampus

go.nature.com/49mB13V

A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!!

This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay!

elifesciences.org/articles/99931

Now you recall it, now you don’t: Working memory performance fluctuates with a theta rhythm In this issue of Neuron, Han et al. leverage a change-identification working memory task coupled with electrophysiological recordings in the macaque frontal eye field to show that information retrieva...

Now you recall it, now you don’t: Working memory performance fluctuates with a theta rhythm
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

Hey, that’s awesome! They are lucky to have you. Congrats! 🎉🎊

Recollection-like memory retrieval in rats is dependent on the hippocampus - PubMed Recognition memory may be supported by two independent types of retrieval, conscious recollection of a specific experience and a sense of familiarity gained from previous exposure to particular stimuli. In humans, signal detection techniques have been used to distinguish recollection and familiarity …

Awesome work! This reminds me of one my favorite papers, which elegantly managed to (effectively) get confidence judgments from rats and observed ROCs that exactly matched human data!
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15356631/

Our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social shows different neural systems for integrating views into places--PPA integrates views *of* a location (e.g., views of a landmark), while RSC integrates views *from* a location (e.g., views of a panorama). Work by the bluesky-less Linfeng Tony Han.

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/

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

Trump administration cannot slash NIH research funding, court rules District Judge Angel Kelley last year blocked the cuts, and on Monday the appeals court agreed.

The district court injunction that prevented NIH from capping indirects at 15% was upheld today on appeal!

www.reuters.com/world/trump-...