Ata Karagoz

Job announcement 📢

@shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction!

Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions!

apply.interfolio.com/165809

This was one of my favorite reads this year so far! The bit where Cristobal Junta and Sasha go from being very pleased with a piece of work and wanting it published to saying they're both incompetent and should be fertilizer really got me.

The audiobook version of the maniac is fun!

Thank you Dr. Devezer! :)

As for what's next, I'm moving to Chicago in a week. I'm lucky to be starting a postdoc position with @akrambakkour.bsky.social at UChicago! Keep your eyes peeled for some cool stuff on that front.

If you're ever in Chicago, hit me up!

My advisors, lab, department, family, friends, and particularly my partner have helped me grow into the scientist and person I am today. I have been borne along by so much generosity and kindness to make it here.

Very sappy, I know.

Two men standing together. One is wearing a creed shirt.

Feels surreal to say but as of Friday I am now Dr. Karagoz. This wouldn't have been possible without the wonderful mentorship, kindness, and patience of @zreagh.bsky.social and @wouterkool.bsky.social.

I have learned a great deal from them, but mainly what sort of mentor I will strive to be.

Very happy to see this work with Euan Prentis posted! If you’re going to CCN next week, go check out Euan’s poster on this work!

📢 @markkho.bsky.social & I are recruiting a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction & mental health

💻 Ideal candidates have experience w/ multi-player web-based experiments & computational modeling

📅 Apps are reviewed on a rolling basis

🔗 apply.interfolio.com/165809

This is unfortunate:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...
I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

Looking forward to sharing our work at #cogsci2025! We aim at getting one step closer to a domain-general formulation of mental costs via policy compression.

Come see my presentation at "Talks 35: Reasoning". It is scheduled at 16:44 PST, August 1 at Nob Hill C!

gershmanlab.com/pubs/LiuGers...

New review paper with Maverick Smith on improving memory for stuff people actually want to remember:
doi.org/10.1177/0963...

Research Associate Screen reader users may encounter difficulty with this site. For assistance with applying, please contact hr-accessibleapplication@osu.edu. If you have questions while submitting an application, pleas...

I'm recruiting a lab manager for my soon-to-be-launched lab at Ohio State! If you know of any recent grads who may be interested both in helping to build the lab and in developing skills in the cognitive neuroscience of memory, please share!

osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/OSUCar...

How the brain shifts between external and internal attention Nobre and Gresch call for an upgrade of attention research by considering how the brain shifts its focus between contents in the external sensory stream and internal memory representations. They highl...

How the brain shifts between external and internal attention
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
#neuroscience

Rob is a fantastic scientist and an all around excellent human being. This is an awesome opportunity to do some really great work! Apply!

Super excited to share this one!! Meta-learning sparsity and learning rate gives rise to brain-like gradients of complementary learning systems. So complementary learning systems emerge organically through behavior optimization, and it's not just two of them!!

Detecting dementia earlier With $4 million grant, UC Irvine researcher seeks to develop inexpensive assessment of cognitive ability

Detecting dementia earlier | With $4 million grant, UC Irvine cognitive scientist Aaron Bornstein seeks to develop inexpensive assessment of cognitive ability

@ucirvine.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @uofcalifornia.bsky.social

Excellent opportunity at a great institution!

Multiple event segmentation mechanisms in the human brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.07.663487v1

Origin and Control of Persistent Mental Content: https://osf.io/dghnf

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

Searching for a postdoc to work on 2 newly NIH-funded projects using intracranial EEG with TMS and direct electrical stimulation to investigate hippocampal networks supporting episodic memory. Research Scientist could also work for post-post-doc candidates. Plz spread!
cnoir.bsd.uchicago.edu/join/

Pleased to say "Space, Time, and Memory", an academic book by Oxford University Press edited by the inimitable Lynn Nadel & Sara Aronowitz is now out.
I contributed a chapter, "Memory and Planning in Brains and Machines".
You can download the entire book for free:
library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

Happy to be at #RLDM2025 in beautiful Ireland 🍀! My group will be presenting in the following sessions:

wooo || Out now in JEP: General || wooo

"Resource Bounds on Mental Simulations: Evidence From a
Liquid-Reasoning Task" 🫗

(by Wang and me)

paper: doi.org/10.1037/xge0...

preprint: bit.ly/liquidSim25

Excited to co-host a workshop at @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social with @danmirea.bsky.social & @anadasilvapinho.bsky.social next week!

We will be exploring applications of reinforcement learning to real-world data 🌳 Sign up to our mailing list to receive updates: sites.google.com/view/rlinthe...

B𝗶𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝘄𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀!

A thread... (1/13)

The FOMO is real, looks like a great workshop!

New preprint! Statistical structure skews object memory toward predictable successors. Model simulations show how this bias can arise from the backward expansion of hippocampal representations.
w/co-first @codydong.bsky.social , @marlietandoc.bsky.social & @annaschapiro.bsky.social osf.io/yuxb6_v1