Gus Hennings

Emotional learning selectively distorts the temporal organization of memory: A quantitative synthesis Episodic memory allows us to remember when an event occurred by situating it within a coherent temporal context. Pavlovian fear conditioning, a widely…

New lab paper: "Emotional learning selectively distorts the temporal organization of memory: A quantitative synthesis." Across 17 different studies, fear conditioning consistently distorted temporal source memory for information encoded before and after. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I am recruiting a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara for an NIH-funded project on the organization of lateral PFC function--across emotion and cognition--using representational fMRI & TMS. I’d love to find someone w/ a background in cognitive control & computational modeling to complement our team! 🏝️ 🧠 🧲

I knew this intuitively from looking at the wiki over the past month, but still a gut punch to see it plainly laid out

🚨 Postdoc Opportunity @ UT Austin!

I’m recruiting a clinical psychologist or neuroscientist to join us in 2025/2026.

Our work: fear/threat + fMRI + EMA + HiTOP + anxiety/trauma/OC psychopathology in adults & adolescents + fancy stats!

📄 Description: tinyurl.com/2jfk8d8m
🌐 Lab: www.scoop-lab.com

My first, first author paper, comparing the properties of memory-augmented large language models and human episodic memory, out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lV174sIRv...

Here’s a quick 🧵(1/n)

#psychscisky

We hope that this simple behavioral method will open a new frontier in studying memory suppression, with strong applications to clinical populations suffering from memory control disorders (e.g., PTSD, GAD, OCD).

In summary: Participants’ eye gaze can provide rich insights into both the top-down strategies that they use to suppress memories and also the bottom-up retrieval dynamics that give rise to lasting forgetting.

These results are in line with theories of active forgetting, which suggest that memories must first become active to some degree before lasting forgetting can occur.

But for pairs that were subsequently forgotten, we saw a different pattern, where there was a brief period of initial gaze reinstatement (corresponding to the memory “intruding” into mind), followed by gaze repulsion.

We also explored how gaze repulsion (during the suppression attempt related to subsequent memory. Gaze dynamics were very different for to-be-suppressed pairs that were subsequently remembered vs. forgotten. For pairs that were subsequently remembered, participants showed robust gaze repulsion…

We hypothesize that gaze repulsion is a strategy that people use to short-circuit retrieval when it starts to happen. This fits with other recent work showing that eye movements can play an active role in cueing - or even disrupting - memory retrieval.

But what happens when people are shown the scene and are told to suppress retrieval of the associated object? Here, we find that people actually look AWAY from the object’s studied location – gaze repulsion!

Previous studies have found that, when people study scene-object pairs, and they are later instructed to retrieve the object given the scene, they look at the location where the object had been presented (gaze reinstatement) – we found this too.

The ability to suppress retrieval is adaptive - but it is not clear how the intent to suppress changes how we interact with retrieval cues. This paper used a pre-registered eye tracking paradigm to examine how we interact with retrieval cues to prevent the retrieval of memories.

Hello Bsky world, I am excited to announce our latest preprint “Eye movements reveal the cognitive dynamics supporting successful memory suppression” in collaboration with Paula Brooks, @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, and @maureenritchey.bsky.social! 🎉👀 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Overjoyed to share that I have received an NOA for my F32 NRSA fellowship with @kennethanorman.bsky.social and @yaelniv.bsky.social! I honestly don't know how it got funded this week, but I'm so thankful to everyone who supported me in this.

Absolutely insane. I was lucky enough to receive an F31 when I was a grad student - it was one of the earliest and strongest signals I received that science was a viable career option. Having it ripped away from me after years of work would have crushed me. I'm so sorry to those affected.