Icon-lab

Official account of the Laboratory for Integrative Cognition and Neuroscience at the University of Maryland - brain, behavior, memory, & cognition

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

From cracking nuts to holding a smartphone while scrolling, manual actions shape attention, memory, and decision-making. @yoojchoo et al.’s new study provides elegant multimodal evidence for how action interacts with cognition. now @CognitionJourn

[Cognition @CognitionJourn]

From cracking nuts to holding a smartphone, simple actions like handgrip are evolutionarily conserved but not cognitively neutral. Physical exertion weakens inhibitory control, allowing irrelevant information to intrude into working memory, a key mental cost of physical effort.

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

Congrats to @Xinchi_Yu on contributing an Editor’s Choice article 🎉 - a well-deserved recognition! 👏

[APA Journals @APA_Journals]

New research in JEP: Human Perception and Performance from @Xinchi_Yu et al. shows that prior semantic knowledge helps people remember brief glimpses of everyday objects, highlighting how memory and perception work together in daily life. Free-to-read: https://t.co/KhvC3YayOr

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

When brain lesions blur memories, they sharpen our theories. @yoojchoo et al. show that hippocampal damage supports mixture models of visual working memory, highlighting the limits of simple one-parameter accounts in real neurological data. @Brain1878
https://t.co/khnvVtjF2O

[Dr. Susan Rivera 🇵🇷 @srivera_tw]

Please join me in congratulating @PSYCTerps Assistant Professor Weizhen “Zane” Xie on being named a 2025 Young Investigator of the @BBRFoundation! Excited to see the results of Zane's BBRF-funded work on a potentially non-invasive way to reduce anxiety ... https://t.co/PWU8vJuD0H

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

Great timing as @Xinchi_Yu wraps up his PhD and prepares for the next chapter in Europe 🇪🇺🇫🇷. Sending him off the Maryland way—with crabcake and a dash of Old Bay 🦀🎓.

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

When faced with a cluttered desk—a stapler, banana, receipt, toy dinosaur—we often group things by meaning to make sense of the mess. @Xinchi_Yu's study shows this spontaneous semantic grouping boosts the efficiency of visual working memory. https://t.co/YPf5gvoHGj @APA_Journals

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

The consistency of memory behavior across people (e.g., recognition, recall) is shaped by many factors — it's great to see further research helping to articulate and disentangle these effects!

[Vishnu Sreekumar (@[email protected]) @vishnusreekr]

Also of particular relevance: recent work by @IconLaboratory & @WilmaBainbridge shows some words are consistently more retrievable across people in cued recall: https://t.co/FHpV0XPYoY. 4/n

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

What happens to visual memory when part of a visually selective brain region is removed? Patient VH, who lost part of his parahippocampal place area and struggled to consolidate scene memories overnight, offers some insights. Read more in Learning & Memory:https://t.co/W1z2wCbGPO

[Dr. Susan Rivera 🇵🇷 @srivera_tw]

Kicking off the week with more great @bsosumd news: @PSYCTerps' Weizhen "Zane" Xie was named a 2025 Searle Scholar, awarding him $300K to build on his existing research on human memory & cognition with a new project concerning semantics. Congrats, Zane! https://t.co/NDnZPzK27o

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

🎉 Our work with NIH collaborators on how human brain neurons efficiently recognizes images is featured in @bsosumd ! Grateful for an amazing team and all the support that made this possible. Check it out! 🧠🔬✨

https://t.co/XR78QzbvCD

[Xinchi Yu @Xinchi_Yu]

Yay! See you at this year's @VSSMtg! Excited to bring together my undergrad advisors (Yan Bao, Ernst Pöppel) and Zane @IconLaboratory in one project. With a fun set of abstract paintings by contemporary artist LaoZhu, we found that lower activation in DNNs predict higher beauty.

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

New evidence into how the medial temporal lobe contributes to visual short-term memory precision. Our latest study shows tDCS over bilateral temporal lobes modulates hippocampal-occipital connectivity, affecting visual memory quality. #hippocampus https://t.co/OKtQF8hVp1

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

We love simpler models, but when they fail to capture individual differences, we have to ask: does simplicity = adequacy? For memory representation, a mixture model often does better at accounting for individual differences. 🧠🔍 https://t.co/jNvEENtzXU

[nature @Nature]

Nature research paper: Neuronal sequences in population bursts encode information in human cortex https://t.co/hnuVvcq7OJ

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

Excited to share an awesome study by former postbac @audreyphan_, now @HarvardMITmdphd, with her first first-authored paper! Audrey skillfully blends various analytical approaches to reveal the role of brain connectivity dynamics in human cognition. #NeuralCoding #HumanCognition

[Audrey Phan @audreyphan_]

incredibly excited to share my first, first-author paper in @NatureComms! how do dynamic changes in functional connectivity give rise to memory formation in humans? 🧠✨
https://t.co/oZf7AeCSKG

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

Also check out the paper that inspired this work: neural coding based on neuronal activation sequences could inspire the design of more efficient computation systems.

https://t.co/GGrDOx2q24

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

The human brain leverages multiple codes to efficiently represent information, such as by organizing the relative timing of neuronal firing within a population of neurons. Learn more about this in our upcoming research article in @Nature!

[NINDS @NIH_NINDS]

Our brain uses unique sequences of neurons firing over time within a population activity burst to correctly categorize visual cues. Learn more about it from a paper out today in Nature: https://t.co/Tj74SBSJby

#NeuralCoding #HumanCognition

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

Congrats to Max Lichtenfeld, a postbac from NIH/NINDS, for an outstanding #sfn2024 talk on how prior associative semantic knowledge contributes to visual change detection in the medial temporal lobe — a key issue to address for understanding human natural visual cognition.

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

Congrats to lab manager Sanikaa Thakurdesai on her first academic presentation, showcasing a lesion-symptom mapping study on the medial temporal lobe's role in visual short-term memory precision. 🧠 #sfn2024

[Icon-lab @IconLaboratory]

One of the perks of Sanikaa’s first presentation at #SfN as a Trainee Professional Development Awardee — she also got to try hot pot for the first time!