| 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.
@karihoffman So to answer your question, it isn't clear what the causal arrow is, but it does seem like trivia experts have superior episodic-semantic binding, that this is *not* due to enhanced episodic memory overall, and it is *not* driven by intentionally trying to link the episodic context to the semantic facts -- as far as we can tell.
I should also say it's not clear whether trivia experts *encode* episodic-semantic links better or are better at *retrieving* them. Exciting questions!
aaron bornstein
Scott Barolo