Aya Ben-Yakov

Super thrilled to finally share the results of our team effort, from the lab of the one and only @ayab.bsky.social. Hopefully it will stir interesting discussions about how the brain balances continuity and segmentation

And a huge thanks to the reviewers. With registered reports, they really become like collaborators, providing useful input from the earliest stages.

There is much more to explore regarding whether continuity and segmentation are independent processes or ends of a spectrum, so hopefully the paradigm will be useful for anyone interested in exploring this (getting serial dependence and segmentation to coexist in the same paradigm was not trivial)

3. When dissociating boundaries from sensory change, two characteristic effects of boundaries on memory diverge:
Higher associative memory at boundaries appears to be driven by sensory change.
Reduced temporal order memory appears to be driven by "boundariness".

2. Serial dependence is reduced even by boundaries that are signaled by *lack* of sensory change (suggesting it is affected by higher level event structure).

1. In a pilot study and 2/3 registered main experiments, we find that event boundaries reduce serial dependence.

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social:
tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum
@erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com

We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

Repeated Viewing of a Narrative Movie Changes Event Timescales in The Brain Many experiences occur repeatedly throughout our lives: we might watch the same movie more than once and listen to the same song on repeat. How does the brain modify its representations of events when...

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?

Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall.

Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

Our new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !

On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience).

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

Natural language processing captures memory content associated with shared neural patterns at encoding People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are cor...

New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It was such a pleasure to collaborate on this Dominika!

Sounds wonderful, have a great trip!

Over 450 scientists have signed and the list is growing. Israeli scientists - please consider adding your name. Even if it feels like you've signed a dozen letters, we need to keep the flame of opposition alive.

Come join us at ELSC!

So exciting! Congratulations!!

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!

Wonderful news, congratulations!!

An exciting new book by Nachum Ulanovsky that calls for a more ecological approach to neuroscience across disciplines, outlining the advances that make this possible. @mitpress.bsky.social

Congratulations! So exciting!

New preprint from Yining Ding (@liliand.bsky.social)!
"Temporal order memory in naturalistic events is scaffolded by semantic knowledge and hierarchical event structure"
osf.io/preprints/ps...

The craziest/loveliest part of departing from @ayab.bsky.social 's lab was this jaw dropping clip they made with KlingAI and a *single* photo of me. I guess this is what you get when you mess with masters of naturalistic stimuli 😱

Such a great gift and now the rest of the world can easily extort me

Good luck Ofer! We're going to miss you!

This is amazing Morgan - incredibly important

Large language models can segment narrative events similarly to humans - Behavior Research Methods Humans perceive discrete events such as “restaurant visits” and “train rides” in their continuous experience. One important prerequisite for studying human event perception is the ability of researche...

So happy that our paper on event segmentation in large language models is now out in Behavior Research Methods! tinyurl.com/2j76882b With @mtoneva.bsky.social, @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, and Manoj Kumar, we show that LLMs can segment narrative text into meaningful events similarly to humans.

Congratulations Ofer!!! Haifa are lucky to have you

This is beautiful and heartbreaking. Thank you for sharing

Human hippocampal and entorhinal neurons encode the temporal structure of experience - Nature Single-neuron recordings from intracranial electrodes inserted into human brains for clinical reasons suggest that the temporal structure of human experience is encoded in human hippocampal and entorh...

Human hippocampal and entorhinal neurons encode the temporal structure of experience.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...