Soroush Mirjalili

Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨!

I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com

Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!

Years ago my lab tried to brainstorm ways to separately manipulate low-level (texture/pattern) and high-level (scene/object) image properties, for studying visual representations in the brain. Thanks to imaginative work by PhD student Zall Hirschstein, we now have a stimulus set that does just that!

This is really cool!

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9

Congrats Ziyao!!

Congrats!!!

Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence - Nature Communications Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms
paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

Hippocampal representations drift in stable multisensory environments - Nature Tracking of individual place cells in mouse CA1 shows that representational drift is not influenced by changes in environment or behaviour, and is lower for more excitable place cells.

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab!

We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time.

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

#science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

AI-guided digital intervention with physiological monitoring reduces intrusive memories after experimental trauma Trauma prevalence is vast globally. Evidence-based digital treatments can help, but most require human guidance. Human guides provide tailored instructions and responsiveness to internal cognitive sta...

I'm excited to share a new preprint! We built a digital, scalable intervention to reduce intrusive memories, combining an AI chatbot with LLM scoring of human-AI conversations and pupillometry predictors of effort and intervention success. I hope you enjoy! arxiv.org/abs/2507.01081

Emotional Arousal‐Induced Episodic Memory Benefits Are Attenuated in Autism Spectrum Disorders, Especially in Older Age Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder associated with episodic memory impairment. Although emotional factors such as arousal, as well as age and depression symptoms, ...

New paper from our lab in which we show that altered arousal in Autism Spectrum Disorders reduces episodic memory for emotional events. Stronger effects with age support an accelerated aging hypothesis of ASD. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Movie-watching evokes ripple-like activity within events and at event boundaries Nature Communications - The neural processes involved in memory formation for realistic experiences remain poorly understood. Here, the authors found that ripple-like activity in the human...

🧠 Paper out!

We investigated how hippocampal and cortical ripples support memory during movie watching. We found that:

🎬 Hippocampal ripples mark event boundaries
🧩 Cortical ripples predict later recall

Ripples may help transform real-life experiences into lasting memories!

rdcu.be/eui9l

This is really really cool!

Rapid emergence of a maths gender gap in first grade - Nature Boys and girls exhibit very similar maths scores upon school entry, but a gender gap in favour of boys becomes highly significant after 4 months of schooling, which increases with years of schooling,&...

Do girls and boys really differ in their mathematical skills? A recent @nature.com paper by @standehaene.bsky.social et al shows that French boys and girls enter school with similar abilities, but after just four months, boys pull ahead 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats!!

Thanks for sharing this, I already linked my submission to this group!

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint! 🚨→ Determinants of Visual Ambiguity Resolution. A new work with @ortiztudela.bsky.social @jvoeller.bsky.social @martinhebart.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

We created ~2k images and collected ~100k responses to study visual ambiguity.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So excited to share my *first* first-author paper, out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!! In this review, we argue that even if you don’t remember being a baby, evidence that infants form episodic-like memories is actually all around us: authors.elsevier.com/c/1l82g4sIRv...

Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it.

We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Systems consolidation reorganizes hippocampal engram circuitry Nature - A study shows that loss of memory precision associated with systems consolidation can be explained by neurogenesis-dependent reorganization of engram circuitry within the hippocampus over...

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation.

rdcu.be/el18q

A short thread follows for those interested.

1/n

Closed-loop control of theta oscillations enhances human hippocampal network connectivity Nature Communications - Closed-loop brain stimulation of the human hippocampal theta rhythm produces lasting enhancement of network communication. This implicates theta rhythms in human hippocampal...

Major team effort on phase-locked stim of human hippocampal theta rhythms finally out in the wild! W/ @jkragel.bsky.social @alikwidge.bsky.social and a cast of many. Thanks to the BRAIN Initiative for making it possible.
rdcu.be/ej7VE

🧠✨How do we rebuild our memories? In our new study, we show that hippocampal ripples kickstart a coordinated expansion of cortical activity that helps reconstruct past experiences.

We recorded iEEG from patients during memory retrieval... and found something really cool 👇(thread)

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!

New paper from my lab! @moorecogneuro.bsky.social shows that memory brain states are diminished or less robustly engaged in healthy older adults compared to young and middle-aged adults. longtermmemorylab.com/wp-content/u...

Next time I get a review request, I know who to suggest as an alternative reviewer now 🤓

Past and present caregiving experiences impact prefrontal connectivity and recall for attachment-schema narratives We investigated how past and current caregiving experiences impacted emotional event processing by examining inter-subject functional correlation in 7- to 15-year-olds during narrative movies depictin...

New preprint 🎉: How do episodic memory, emotions, and schemas for caregiver experiences come together in kids’ brains and verbal recall? Check out our new results showing how past and present childhood experiences shape perception and memory for movies: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Check out our latest paper today in Nature: “Goal specific hippocampal inhibition gates learning” www.nature.com/articles/s41...
By Nuri Jeong, Xiao Zheng, Abby Paulson, Steph Prince and colleagues.

This is really cool!