Xinming Xu

The role of context in continuity and segmentation Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 11 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02403-wAcross three experiments, Baror et al. show that context shifts reduce serial dependence (bias towards prior choices) and shape memory at event boundaries.

The role of context in continuity and segmentation

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

Hierarchical Context Guides Human Memory Search: https://osf.io/mbwe9

Hippocampal-guided reconstruction of an event's prior temporal context https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.05.668710v1

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 &👇

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

Hierarchical coding of local and global positions in episodic memory for naturalistic sequences https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.26.672267v1

The preprint of my 1st project in grad school is up 🙌 We propose a simple, information-theoretic model of how humans remember narratives. We tested it with the help of open-source LLMs. Plz check out this thread for details ➡️ Many thanks to my wonderful advisors! It's been a fun adventure!!

New preprint! Thrilled to share my latest work with @esfinn.bsky.social -- "Sensory context as a universal principle of language in humans and LLMs"

osf.io/preprints/ps...

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! 📖🧠

I want to highlight a special issue in honor of Sarah DuBrow, a brilliant scientist and dear friend who passed away in 2022.

We contributed a paper in which we disentangled the importance of temporal and causal relationships while participants recalled the non-linear narrative, Memento. 🧵 ⬇️ 1/9

Key-value memory in the brain Classical models of memory in psychology and neuroscience rely on similarity-based retrieval of stored patterns, where similarity is a function of retrieval cues and the stored patterns. While parsimo...

Key-value memory is an important concept in modern machine learning (e.g., transformers). Ila Fiete, Kazuki Irie, and I have written a paper showing how key-value memory provides a way of thinking about memory organization in the brain:
arxiv.org/abs/2501.02950

Excited to have this out in @natureportfolio.bsky.social!

We found that real & fictional people communicate roughly 1.5x more about the past than the future.

In turn, this influences the interferences we make about past & future events in *other* people's lives.

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

🙋thank you!