Courtney Kurinec

Sleep and Biological Rhythms Small shifts in diurnal rhythms are associated with an increase in suicide: The effect of daylight saving Michael BERK, Seetal DODD, Karen HALLAM, Lesley BERK, John GLEESON, Margaret HENRY 21 February 2008 Abstract Large disruptions of chronobiological rhythms are documented as destabilizing individuals with bipolar disorder; however, the impact of small phase altering events is unclear. Australian suicide data from 1971 to 2001 were assessed to determine the impact on the number of suicides of a 1-h time shift due to daylight saving. The results confirm that male suicide rates rise in the weeks following the commencement of daylight saving, compared to the weeks following the return to eastern standard time and for the rest of the year.

“Suicides rise following commencement of Daylight Saving Time, compared to the return to Standard Time.”

Are episodic and semantic memory really that different? Using closely matched tasks, we found no substantial neural differences between recalling personal experiences and general knowledge: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02390-4

New study by Piotr Szymanek, Magdalena Senderecka & @mateuszhohol.bsky.social is out in 'Psychonomic Bulletin & Review'. Biological motion detection is basic and automatic—but expectations still bias what we see, especially under uncertainty. OA: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

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.

New preprint: Inference over hidden contexts shapes the geometry of conceptual knowledge for flexible behaviour.

In this pre-reg study, our core claim was that we don’t just learn stimulus-reward. We infer hidden context and that inference re-wires attention and neural state space on the fly.
1/8

Is WM a gateway to LTM? In this registered report we find that higher WM load rarely impairs LTM encoding - suggesting WM capacity is not a bottleneck for forming LTM traces. @as-souza.bsky.social @edamizrak.bsky.social @cognition-zurich.bsky.social psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... [1/3]

(1/4)
🧠 Did you know that kids remember time differently than adults? Our new preprint review w/ @drjeni-mdlab.bsky.social discusses the real implications for juvenile justice & why we need to ask about timing in ways that match kids' developing brains ⚖️

Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Experimental participants to us

Memory problems will change how you see the world...literally 👀

Across two new papers, we examined the eye movement patterns of younger adults, older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and amnesic cases.

1/5

New Anti-Autocracy Handbook Aims to Give Power Back to Scholars APS Fellow Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues recently developed the Anti-Autocracy Handbook, designed to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding.

APS Fellow @lewan.bsky.social & colleagues have recently developed the Anti-Autocracy Handbook, which they describe as “a call to action, resilience, and collective defense of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism.”

A figure showing the neurophysiological and functional significance of silver vine response in cats.

Not only do catnip and silver vine hold a special place in felines’ hearts, but the intoxicating chemicals in these plants also protect cats from mosquito bites, according to #ScienceAdvances research from 2021.

Learn more on #InternationalCatDay: scim.ag/3HpxYwv

The diffusion model's drift rate parameter primarily reflects efficiency, rather than speed, of evidence accumulation: https://osf.io/nu9gm

New press on our study linking the locus coeruleus to memory formation 🔵: newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/bra... .

“…at a time when legislation promises ‘big and beautiful change,’ it turns out one of the brain’s smallest players may have the biggest impact on how we understand and remember our lives.”

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

Event structure sculpts neural population dynamics in the lateral entorhinal cortex Our experience of the world is a continuous stream of events that must be segmented and organized at multiple timescales. The neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unknown. In this work, we...

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it.
In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2)

👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Episodic memory and semantic knowledge interact to guide eye movements during visual search in scenes: Distinct effects of conscious and unconscious memory - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Episodic memory and semantic knowledge can each exert strong influences on visual attention when we search through real-world scenes. However, there is debate surrounding how they interact when both are present; specifically, results conflict as to whether memory consistently improves visual search when semantic knowledge is available to guide search. These conflicting results could be driven by distinct effects of different types of episodic memory, but this possibility has not been examined. To test this, we tracked participants’ eyes while they searched for objects in semantically congruent and incongruent locations within scenes during a study and test phase. In the test phase containing studied and new scenes, participants gave confidence-based recognition memory judgments that indexed different types of episodic memory (i.e., recollection, familiarity, unconscious memory) for the background scenes, then they searched for the target. We found that semantic knowledge consistently influenced both early and late eye movements, but the influence of memory depended on the type of memory involved. Recollection improved first saccade accuracy in terms of heading towards the target in both congruent and incongruent scenes. In contrast, unconscious memory gradually improved scanpath efficiency over the course of search, but only when semantic knowledge was relatively ineffective (i.e., incongruent scenes). Together, these findings indicate that episodic memory and semantic knowledge are rationally integrated to optimize attentional guidance, such that the most precise or effective forms of information available – which depends on the type of episodic memory available – are prioritized.

Our new paper on how episodic memory and semantic knowledge interact to influence eye movements during search is out now in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, with @jmhenderson.bsky.social and Andy Yonelinas! (summary below) link.springer.com/article/10.3...
#psynomPBR @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

🧪 Detailed data viz NYT article, out today, on the extent of funding cuts at the National Science Foundation.

This "broken pie chart" is neat & new to me: Powerfully shows the slowdown in new NSF awards across areas.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

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...

The SIK3-N783Y mutation is associated with the human natural short sleep trait | PNAS Sleep is an essential component of our daily life. A mutation in human salt induced kinase 3 (hSIK3), which is critical for regulating sleep durati...

Now the discovery of the 4th gene variant which promotes short sleep (4-6 hours) with full restfulness, potentially a path to a drug for sleep efficiency someday
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Tired of spending months teaching every new student how to clean and analyze sleep EEG? 🧠💤
We were too. @labnir.bsky.social
That's why we built SleepEEGpy- a simple open-source pipeline to make sleep EEG research faster, easier, and standardized! 👇
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

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...

New paper out with @karampbell.bsky.social and Caitlin Mahy! We tested whether associative memory improvements in children aged 8-12 were related to the development of associative binding or attentional control. We had children complete an implicit and explicit associative memory task.

John Hurley Flavell John H. Flavell is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Flavell is a founder of social cognitive ...

John Flavell, a giant of developmental psychology, who introduced the study of metacognition, died peacefully at age 96. www.amacad.org/person/john-...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

A novel fMRI study in Science shows that babies as young as 12 months old can encode memories.

The findings suggest that infantile amnesia is more likely caused by memory retrieval failures rather than an inability to form memories in the first place. scim.ag/422LFb9

In such a noisy world, it can be difficult to remember who said what. In a new paper at @jcrnews.bsky.social, @spillersas.bsky.social and I find that source memory - the attribution of claims to their original sources - is more accurate for opinions than for facts.

academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...

Remembering Psychology Professor Sam Sommers Sam Sommers, longtime professor at Tufts, studied the psychological causes and consequences of racism

Social psychology lost a giant, and I lost a dear friend and collaborator. Still processing the loss of Sam Sommers, and probably will be for some time. Cherish the time you have with your people, folks.

now.tufts.edu/2025/03/20/r...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

March 21, 2-3 pm ET: What to do when your federal grant has been stopped or terminated

If you have a federal grant, I *highly* recommend going to this Friday's webinar on responding to grant terminations.

Lisa Brown, former general counsel at Dept of Ed, will present along with other lawyers.

Friday, March 21, 2-3 pm. More info & register here: www.linkedin.com/pulse/regist...

Up to 15% of doctoral, and 20% of postdoctoral awards are slated to be held by international scholars.

Excited to see this big collaborative project out in the world @naturehumbehav.bsky.social !

Sleep actively enhances memory for the temporal sequence - but not sensory details - of our real-life experiences, even months-to-years later. 🧠 oscillations matter.

Original 🧵: bsky.app/profile/diam...