Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · 3d

Traveling from the US to Canada for a conference next week, and Air Canada just emailed me warning me how risky it is to be in the United States right now 🫡

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Reposted by Zach Reagh

Aidan Horner @aidanhorner.bsky.social · 10d

If you're interested in the cognitive neuroscience of memory feel free to email me!

I do experimental psychology, brain imaging (fMRI and MEG) and a bit of modelling. Lab is doing stuff on forgetting, aging, schemas, and event boundaries, but we're not limited to that.

#psychscisky #neuroskyence

Aidan Horner @aidanhorner.bsky.social · 10d

It's that time of year when many start thinking about applying for PhDs. If you're applying for a UK PhD position, here is a blog post I wrote a while back that might be helpful

#cognition #psychscisky #neuroskyence #psychjobs

How to get PhD funding in the UK

It is that time of year again. The leaves are turning golden, red, and orange (or just brown), the nights are drawing in, and there is a chi...

aidanhorner.blogspot.com

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · 12d

Hey, only good non-motiony vibes from me! Another day, another frontal or cerebellar blob randomly going “bonjour”

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · 12d

Can we talk about the dorsal frontal situation?

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Sep 11

Should I start telling students to get degrees in AI instead of cognitive neuroscience? Asking for a field.

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Reposted by Zach Reagh

Allie Sinclair @asinclair.bsky.social · Sep 8

🌟 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...

Sinclair Lab

The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair

www.sinclairlab-rice.com

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Sep 4

Another new-ish paper: Events in the stream of behavior

Maverick Smith, @jzacks.bsky.social, and I discuss how the brain (esp. the Default Mode Network) represents event models, leveraging different information domains and scales of information processing.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Sep 4

“I’m a behind” 😂

Well, in all fairness, I truly am.

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Sep 3

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...

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Sep 3

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...

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Sep 3

Check out a new preprint from Adi, postdoc working with me and Jeff Zacks. I’m *extremely* excited to finally, officially get this out into the world 🙂

Adi Upadhyayula @adibuoy23.bsky.social · Sep 3

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

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Aug 27

I just got NOAs on an NSF grant and an R01 in the same week, and I cannot begin to put into words the bizarre combination of relief, exhaustion, elation, and survivor’s guilt I am currently feeling.

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Aug 2

What a fun and surreal day. Huge congrats to @atabk.bsky.social for defending his dissertation. I couldn’t be more proud ❤️

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Jun 3

I’m just sitting here looking at the list of grant applications I had planned to work on this summer, and struggling to avoid the conclusion that it will be a huge waste of time.

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · May 31

Thanks for the kind words 🙂 I do want to interject some levity and clarify that, despite what she’d want you to believe, she was a deeply weird and unserious creature. And although the bar for dachshunds is pretty low in this regard, she was *so* smart. It was occasionally a problem.

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · May 30

You might have seen this pup in some of my papers and presentations. This is Maddie, and she was my best friend in the whole world. We had 16 wonderful years together. This past week has been incredibly hard, but it’s helped me refocus on what really matters amidst all the chaos in the world.

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · May 21

Much needed physical punishment and mental replenishment. Druid Arch in Canyonlands National Park.

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · May 14

My lab is full of deeply unserious people, and I love them

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Apr 29

Speaking of the task, Ata’s nickname for it is “Wordsconsin” 😂

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Apr 28

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

Communications Psychology @commspsychol.nature.com · Apr 28

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...

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...

www.nature.com

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Apr 4

Awful things were happening *before* wealthy people started losing money today.

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Mar 30

This is SUCH a cool study. Know that one effect event boundaries have on temporal order memory? The impairment they cause? Turns out that effect depends on the “events” being arbitrary. Things look very different when you test order memory for meaningfully-associated events.

Yining Ding @liliand.bsky.social · Mar 30

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! 📖🧠

Jeff Zacks @jzacks.bsky.social · Mar 26

New preprint from Yining Ding (@liliand.bsky.social)!
"Temporal order memory in naturalistic events is scaffolded by semantic knowledge and hierarchical event structure"
osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Mar 29

See you there ✊

Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Mar 29

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!

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Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social · Mar 29

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 🙂

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