Zach Reagh

Your jam reviews are a reliable source of dopamine. Please do it for the fans.

Also, I tried a jam calendar last year and I really struggled to keep going after about 10 straight days of jam. Respect.

The Toronto Blue Jays have the opportunity to do the funniest thing to the United States in 2025, and I am 100% here for it.

I would obviously prefer a resounding “no” in favor of sticking to our principles, but I suppose it is worth acknowledging that a university such as ours - located in a place subject to deeply conservative politics - is not in the easiest position one could imagine. In the end, I’ll take it.

Traveling from the US to Canada for a conference next week, and Air Canada just emailed me warning me how risky it is to be in the United States right now 🫡

If you're interested in the cognitive neuroscience of memory feel free to email me!

I do experimental psychology, brain imaging (fMRI and MEG) and a bit of modelling. Lab is doing stuff on forgetting, aging, schemas, and event boundaries, but we're not limited to that.

#psychscisky #neuroskyence

Hey, only good non-motiony vibes from me! Another day, another frontal or cerebellar blob randomly going “bonjour”

Can we talk about the dorsal frontal situation?

Should I start telling students to get degrees in AI instead of cognitive neuroscience? Asking for a field.

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

🌟 Excited to share that I'm recruiting PhD students in Psychology for my new lab at Rice University this cycle (Signal boost appreciated!)

To learn more, check out the Learning & Behavior Change Lab website:
www.sinclairlab-rice.com

Applications are due Dec 1st: psychology.rice.edu/graduate/pro...

Another new-ish paper: Events in the stream of behavior

Maverick Smith, @jzacks.bsky.social, and I discuss how the brain (esp. the Default Mode Network) represents event models, leveraging different information domains and scales of information processing.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“I’m a behind” 😂

Well, in all fairness, I truly am.

Next up, from @atabk.bsky.social and @wouterkool.bsky.social: Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure. In sum, Ata stuck hidden (and shifting) rules into a word list learning task, creating "events" that influenced the structure of recall.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I'm a behind on shouting out new papers!

From Angelique Delarazan: Narrative Coherence Warps the Timeline of Recalled Naturalistic Events. In sum, when recalling stories, people systematically deviate from temporal organization to follow the narrative threads.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Check out a new preprint from Adi, postdoc working with me and Jeff Zacks. I’m *extremely* excited to finally, officially get this out into the world 🙂

I just got NOAs on an NSF grant and an R01 in the same week, and I cannot begin to put into words the bizarre combination of relief, exhaustion, elation, and survivor’s guilt I am currently feeling.

What a fun and surreal day. Huge congrats to @atabk.bsky.social for defending his dissertation. I couldn’t be more proud ❤️

I’m just sitting here looking at the list of grant applications I had planned to work on this summer, and struggling to avoid the conclusion that it will be a huge waste of time.

Thanks for the kind words 🙂 I do want to interject some levity and clarify that, despite what she’d want you to believe, she was a deeply weird and unserious creature. And although the bar for dachshunds is pretty low in this regard, she was *so* smart. It was occasionally a problem.

You might have seen this pup in some of my papers and presentations. This is Maddie, and she was my best friend in the whole world. We had 16 wonderful years together. This past week has been incredibly hard, but it’s helped me refocus on what really matters amidst all the chaos in the world.

Much needed physical punishment and mental replenishment. Druid Arch in Canyonlands National Park.

My lab is full of deeply unserious people, and I love them

Speaking of the task, Ata’s nickname for it is “Wordsconsin” 😂

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

Awful things were happening *before* wealthy people started losing money today.

This is SUCH a cool study. Know that one effect event boundaries have on temporal order memory? The impairment they cause? Turns out that effect depends on the “events” being arbitrary. Things look very different when you test order memory for meaningfully-associated events.

See you there ✊

Also, I’m doing a talk 3/30 1:30pm in Symposium 1: Creating the structure of ongoing experience, chaired by the one and only @jameswardantony.bsky.social. Also featuring talks by Janice Chen and New Investigator Awardee @esfinn.bsky.social. Hope to see some of you there!

Hey friends! Come say hi to folks from my lab and from @jzacks.bsky.social lab at #CNS2025. We have a bunch of in-progress stuff this time, including a “sketchpad series” by @raynatang.bsky.social. Also, Veronica and June (with @alexbarnett.bsky.social) were undergrads when they did their projects 🙂

Save the date! If you're going to CNS, stop by my poster on Sunday evening to get the whole story about what hippocampal timescales can tell us about memory and aging! Poster C42 #CNS2025

Speaking of dismaying, I somehow still haven’t watched that 👀