| Lab website | https://www.alylab.org |
| ORCiD | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4033-6134 |
Day to day experiences have many commonalities. How do we resolve competition between similar memories to guide our attention in an adaptive way?
Hippocampal differentiation of competing memories predicts the precision of memory-guided eye movements and the precision of preparatory coding in visual cortex during memory-guided attention.
Excited to share this work by the inimitable Serra Favila!
Thanks to @ankosov.bsky.social for an excellent post for @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social about our paper with @mariam, Sam Feng, @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, and Jon Cohen!
"Why do you sometimes see what you expect to see? The answer may be in your memory." wp.me/p8IxYp-2s3
I urge you* to think deeply about these issues if you want to promote equitable review systems and diversity of identities, methods, and topics; and if you want to challenge the status quo and reliance on flawed metrics to evaluate people and their science.
*If you're in a position of power – i.e., if you are in any situation in which you make judgments about others' work and careers – you CAN change things for the better. If you want to.
How we are evaluated by others has critical consequences for our careers. Decisions about publications, grants, promotions, & tenure depend on input from peers.
But there are numerous documented biases in peer review. We review these biases & call for a better way forward.
Peer review is a core component of scientific practice. Although peer review ideally improves research and promotes rigor, it also has consequences for what types of research are published and cited and who wants to (and is able to) advance in research-focused careers. Despite these consequences, fe …
#fontbracket matches #17-24 are over. Two bracketeers predicted all 8 winners:
👑 Mariam Aly @mariam, who donated to https://projectsouth.org/,
and
👑 Laura McKnight @LauraMcKnight—also the overall point leader, with 20 points—who gave to Planned Parenthood.
How do we balance paying attention to the external world vs our internal thoughts?
The basal forebrain & dorsal attention network dynamically interact with the hippocampus to balance external and internal attention.
Super proud of grad student and first author Craig Poskanzer for his tenacity in leading this project!
#neuroscience #psychology #memory
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2023/08/18/JNEUROSCI.0029-23.2023
Everyday experience requires processing external signals from the world around us and internal information retrieved from memory. To do both, the brain must fluctuate between states that are optimized for external vs. internal attention. Here, we focus on the hippocampus as a region that may serve at the interface between these forms of attention, and ask how it switches between prioritizing sensory signals from the external world vs. internal signals related to memories and thoughts. Pharmacological, computational, and animal studies have identified input from the cholinergic basal forebrain as important for biasing the hippocampus towards processing external information, whereas complementary research suggests the dorsal attention network (DAN) may aid in allocating attentional resources towards accessing internal information. We therefore tested the hypothesis that the basal forebrain and DAN drive the hippocampus towards external and internal attention, respectively. We used data from 29 human participants (17 female) who completed 2 attention tasks during fMRI. One task (“memory-guided”) required proportionally more internal attention, and proportionally less external attention, than the other (“explicitly instructed”). We discovered that background functional connectivity between the basal forebrain and hippocampus was stronger during the explicitly instructed vs. memory-guided task. In contrast, DAN-hippocampus background connectivity was stronger during the memory-guided vs. explicitly instructed task. Finally, the strength of DAN-hippocampus background connectivity was correlated with performance on the memory-guided but not explicitly instructed task. Together, these results provide evidence that the basal forebrain and DAN may modulate the hippocampus to switch between external and internal attention. Significance Statement How does the brain balance the need to pay attention to internal thoughts and external sensations? We focused on the human hippocampus, a region that may serve at the interface between internal and external attention, and asked how its functional connectivity varies based on attentional states. The hippocampus was more strongly coupled with the cholinergic basal forebrain when attentional states were guided by the external world rather than retrieved memories. This pattern flipped for functional connectivity between the hippocampus and dorsal attention network, which was higher for attention tasks that were guided by memory rather than external cues. Together, these findings show that distinct networks in the brain may modulate the hippocampus to switch between external and internal attention.
How well are you able to navigate while facing imminent threat?
Being pursued by a predator hurts our ability to navigate efficiently and take flexible new paths when unexpected obstacles are encountered.
This work has been ongoing for a while and I'm thrilled it's finally out!
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-023-10036-z
Goal-directed behavior requires adaptive systems that respond to environmental demands. In the absence of threat (or presence of reward), individuals can explore many behavioral trajectories, effectively interrogating the environment across multiple dimensions. This leads to flexible, relational memory encoding and retrieval. In the presence of danger, motivation shifts to an imperative state characterized by a narrow focus of attention on threatening information. This impairs flexible, relational memory. We test how these motivational shifts affect behavioral flexibility in an ecologically valid setting. Participants learned the structure of maze-like environments and navigated to the location of objects in both safe and threatening contexts. The latter contained a predator that could ‘capture’ participants, leading to electric shock. After learning, the path to some objects was unpredictably blocked, forcing a detour for which one route was significantly shorter. We predicted that threat would push participants toward an imperative state, leading to less efficient and less flexible navigation. Threat caused participants to take longer paths to goal objects and less efficient detours when obstacles were encountered. Threat-related impairments in detour navigation persisted after controlling for non-detour navigation performance, and non-detour navigation was not a reliable predictor of detour navigation. This suggests a specific impairment in flexible navigation during detours, an impairment unlikely to be explained by more general processes like predator avoidance or divided attention that may be present during non-detour navigation. These results provide ecologically valid evidence that dynamic, observable threats reduce flexible use of cognitive maps to guide behavior.
The brain has partly separable systems for visually navigating an environment and recognizing what it is.
Visually guided navigation develops later than scene recognition; and navigation can be impaired without an impairment in scene recognition.
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2023/08/09/JNEUROSCI.0153-23.2023
Recent neural evidence suggests that the human brain contains dissociable systems for “scene categorization” (i.e., recognizing a place as a particular kind of place, for example, a kitchen), including the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and “visually guided navigation” (e.g., finding our way through a kitchen, not running into the kitchen walls or banging into the kitchen table), including the occipital place area (OPA). However, converging behavioral data – for instance, whether scene categorization and visually guided navigation abilities develop along different timelines and whether there is differential breakdown under neurological deficit – would provide even stronger support for this two-scene-systems hypothesis. Thus, here we tested scene categorization and visually guided navigation abilities in 131 typically developing children between 4 and 9 years of age, as well as 46 adults with Williams syndrome (WS) – a developmental disorder with known impairment on “action” tasks, yet relative sparing on “perception” tasks, in object processing. We found that i) visually guided navigation is later to develop than scene categorization, and ii) WS adults are impaired in visually guided navigation, but not scene categorization, relative to mental-age matched children. Taken together, these findings provide the first developmental and neuropsychological evidence for dissociable cognitive systems for recognizing places and navigating through them. Significance statement Two decades ago Milner and Goodale showed us that identifying objects and manipulating them involve distinct cognitive and neural systems. Recent neural evidence suggests the same may be true of our interactions with our environment: identifying places and navigating through them are dissociable systems. Here we provide converging behavioral evidence supporting this two-scene-systems hypothesis – finding both differential development and breakdown of “scene categorization” and “visually guided navigation”. This finding suggests that the division of labor between perception and action systems is a general organizing principle for the visual system, not just a principle of the object processing system in particular.
Are you an early career scholar in psych/neuro looking for feedback on a manuscript before submitting it for publication?
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Please complete the following form to indicate your interest and availability in participating in Reviewer Zero's FAIR program. FAIR will pair you with an experienced faculty reviewer who will provide you with formative and actionable feedback on a manuscript that you are working on. We will attempt to match you with someone with expertise in your area of interest but exact matches may not be possible depending on demand and reviewer availability. To participate in this program, you must be an early career researcher (undergraduate to post-doc) in psychology, neuroscience, or a related field, and have a manuscript draft ready to submit to us during Summer-Fall 2023. To learn more about Reviewer Zero, please visit our website: https://www.reviewerzero.net/. You can also check out our preprint on how to change the culture of peer review to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion: https://psyarxiv.com/435xz
This study was a ton of fun and I'm so proud of first author Monica Thieu and second author Lauren Wilkins for their hard work. This was a great example of taking inspiration from real life to make novel discoveries in the lab!
And thanks Ken Jennings for the consultations :)
aaron bornstein
Scott Barolo