Nichole Bouffard

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!

Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

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...

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...

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

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

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

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...

1/ 🚨 Preprint alert!
How does the brain make sense of continuous experience?
We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall.
👉 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233

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!

New preprint from Yining Ding @liliand.bsky.social! People use semantic event knowledge and grouping to remember the temporal order of events.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Yes! I’m really looking forward to it too!

Thank you Mariam ☺️

Discrete Subfields and Continuous Gradients Coexist: A Multi-Scale View of Hippocampal Organization The human hippocampus is studied via two competing frameworks: one dividing it into discrete anatomical subfields with distinct computational processes, and another describing it as a continuous, func...

Is the hippocampus best understood in term of discrete subfields or functional gradients?

Functional gradients are recapitulated within each hippocampal subfield, supporting a role for both discrete & continuously changing computations.

Neat work by Bouffard, @barense.bsky.social, & Moscovitch!

Discrete Subfields and Continuous Gradients Coexist: A Multi-Scale View of Hippocampal Organization https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.19.671141v1

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

Preprint⭐
Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Proud to share the first preprint of my PhD w/ @barense.bsky.social & Mursal Jahed:

“Putting the testing effect to the test in the wild: Retrieval enhances real-world memories and promotes their semantic integration while preserving episodic integrity”

See thread! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

NIH indirect cost cuts will affect the economy and employment - Nature Human Behaviour Nature Human Behaviour - NIH indirect cost cuts will affect the economy and employment

Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com: Cuts to NIH funding will impact the economy and employment nationwide. We visualize these losses and advocate for a theory-driven approach to communicating local, self-relevant impact. w/ @joshuasweitz.bsky.social + SCIMaP team:

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

Congratulations Allie!!!

The Second Database of Emotional Videos from Ottawa (DEVO-2): Over 1300 brief video clips rated on valence, arousal, impact, and familiarity - Behavior Research Methods We introduce an updated set of video clips for research on emotion and its relations with perception, cognition, and behavior. These 1380 brief video clips each portray realistic episodes. They were s...

Pandemic project ready to share! Short movies (many of which are emotional) you can use as stimuli:
rdcu.be/ekNMo

Stimuli, data, and code:
osf.io/hk32g/?view_...

#psynomBRM

Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure - Communications Psychology This study examines how event boundaries affect recall of items in a decision-making task. Events structured recall, which was impaired for items after boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showe...

This study examines how events structured recall, which was impaired for items after event boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showed that decision certainty predicts recall success.
@atabk.bsky.social @wouterkool.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A collection of modules, datasets, and other resources for learning to program in R, geared toward students in psychology and neuroscience: ritcheym.github.io/ppn/

Hi friends, the Spark Society's NSF funding has been terminated. We are dedicated to continuing our work and hope we can rely on you for support.

Excited that we are recruiting for a new postdoctoral program in Cognitive, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience at #WashU! Get in touch if you have questions!
sites.wustl.edu/systemsneuro...

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...

ICYMI: Here is a great summary of our
@commspsychol.bsky.social paper examining the link between curiosity, spatial exploration, and memory via virtual environments. with @cjhodgetts.bsky.social @danlucen.bsky.social

www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/29...

Paper link 👉🏻: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This is so not okay.

Excited to share our new preprint! Using a narrative reading paradigm, we showed that temporal order memory reconstruction can depend on multiple sources of information - factors like knowledge about typical event order and hierarchical event structure can both play important roles! 📖🧠

Poster C151

#CNS2025 If you are curious about how hippocampal subfields distinctively support the learning of surprising exceptions to category knowledge, come check out my poster at Session C tomorrow between 5 and 7 pm!

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 🙂