Associate Professor in Psychology at Columbia, PI of https://www.dpmlab.org/
Chris Baldassano
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Columbia Psych is hiring *two* junior faculty in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience this year! If you work on cognition (broadly defined), submit your application materials as soon as possible (review starts Nov 1). If you have questions you can reach out to me by email! apply.interfolio.com/175428
The final typeset version of this paper is online now! Check out the new analysis approach that Narjes developed to track changes in event structure at multiple timescales, allowing us to see how event dynamics in a film clip change with repeated viewing
Nice article from Columbia News on our new paper about neural representations of places and remembered items - including a video of the creative VR environment made by @xrmasiso.bsky.social ! news.columbia.edu/news/places-...
I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.
๐ Happy to see this paper published in PNAS
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2529176123
Asking: is curiosity a homeostatic drive, or a policy learned through reinforcement?
How can we tell, and why does it matter? ๐งต๐
With Jane Mok, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social, Caroline Marvin, and Daphna Shohamy ๐
The Memory Disorders Research Society (www.memorydisorders.org) is now seeking nominations for new members! Self-nominations are welcome. Application is open until April 15 @ 11:59pm PT.
Reach out if you have questions about the society or its (amazing) annual meeting! forms.gle/Qn7mchoPpaqL...
Our new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning
Years ago my lab tried to brainstorm ways to separately manipulate low-level (texture/pattern) and high-level (scene/object) image properties, for studying visual representations in the brain. Thanks to imaginative work by PhD student Zall Hirschstein, we now have a stimulus set that does just that!
What happens when we learn a new shortcut between places we thought were unconnected? Hannah found that the hippocampus rapidly adjusts its representations of environments to join them into a connected map - excited to share this final paper from her PhD work with me and @mariamaly.bsky.social !
Is forgetting useful? This was among the deep questions about how memories are formed and used explored at Local Circuits, a symposium that brought together leading experts in biological and artificial intelligence @columbiauniversity.bsky.social
zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/symposium-me...
How do the brainโs event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?
Brain regionsโ representations can become coarser or finer as events become familiar. Slow-timescale structure predicts memory.
Excited to share this work w/ Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!
Excited to release the SPOT grid: a new image set that factorially crosses scene-object & texture-pattern pairings.
We hope these stimuli will be useful to researchers aiming to (partially) disentangle the contributions of lower- and higher-level visual features to behavior & brain activity.
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What drives human curiosity? Is it a need to balance stimulation โ or something we learn over time?
In our ๐จ new preprint, we show that learning reinforces curiosity, especially for related content.
osf.io/9bw6j_v2
w/ Jane Mok, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social , Caroline Marvin, Daphna Shohamy
๐งต๐
What if we could tell you how well youโll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? โ๏ธ
In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the ๐พ๐๐ฎ๐น๐ถ๐๐ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐ฎ ๐๐ฝ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป can be measured with neuroimaging โ and ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ฐ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐น๐น ๐ป๐ฒ๐ ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ถ๐น๐น ๐๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐ธ.
How do we update our predictions when our environment changes?
The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions.
Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Many everyday experiences share a recurring structure: routines, familiar routes, rewatched films, and replayed songs. How do repeated encounters with such structure alter the brainโs representations ...
Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the hippocampus. For such predictions to be useful, they sh...
New study by @xrmasiso.bsky.social et al shows that spatial contexts with more reliable brain representations better support memory for future experiences within them, revealing how stable neural maps help the brain organize and recall life events.
This study shows that spatial contexts with more reliable brain representations better support memory for future experiences within them, revealing how stable neural maps help the brain organize and recall life events.
