Xinming Xu
@Xu_Xinming
memory, time, narratives, information, prediction, causality, networks, NLP, brain | grad student @ContextMemLab @DartmouthPBS
Big shouts to the collaborative work with Nai Ding on line at @NatureHumBehav, demonstrating 1D-to-2D hierarchical reorganization in human sequence working memory. Congrats to @YingFanLaLaLa and Muzhi! nature.com/articles/s4156…
Do our thoughts have ‘momentum’? Consider a recent conversation that keeps popping into your thoughts during a work meeting. Or, the events of a story that lingers well after you put a book down/finish a movie. We also use phrases like “stuck in my head” or “on my mind”.
Very proud of the work we did, and it couldn’t have happened without my amazing collaborators!
New study shows people use popularity & social distance to strategically spread gossip. @alicex78 @NassarLab @apaxon @orielf #SocialNetworks nature.com/articles/s4156…
🧠📷 New paper out! How does the brain make sense of a story? Combining behavioral data, #fMRI, and #LLMs, our study explores how distinct hippocampal-cortical systems support the #encoding and #sequencing of #narrative events during ongoing comprehension. nature.com/articles/s4200…
New preprint: osf.io/preprints/psya… Been thinking a lot lately about how to achieve a generalized theory of memory integrating our knowledge from both traditional (e.g., random word lists) and naturalistic memory experiments (e.g., movies, narratives). Feedback is very welcome!
By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences. Ingrid Wickelgren reports: quantamagazine.org/how-event-scri…
Excited to share our new work in @NatureComms . Introducing a "comprehensive exploration" model that uncovers all mechanisms of visual working memory in one framework, built from a single large-scale controlled experiment. doi.org/10.1038/s41467…
1/7📖 Just published: our paper uncovers universal patterns in how we recall stories! As narratives grow longer, our recall shows scale-invariance—leading to emergent semantic abstraction. Curious? Check out our animated illustration & read on! #Memory #CognitiveScience #Physics
Excited to see our new paper out. Our @DurhamIAS interdisciplinary project offers new thoughts on what context in memory is and what it is not: Context in memory is reconstructed, not encoded sciencedirect.com/science/articl… @aidanhorner @JamieAinge @SuttonProfessor @ProfSJJames
Our retrodicting vs predicting movie events paper is finally out! We didn't think about "conversation" at first, but it turns out that conversation references play a major role in how we "infer" unobserved events in other people's lives.
Now out in @NatureComms (lead: @Xu_Xinming)! How do conversations shape how (and what) people guess about the unknown past and future (e.g., in other people's lives)? Paper/code/data: nature.com/articles/s4146…
Excited about this paper looking at the intersection of storytelling and decision-making. From an amazing trainees’ love for improv and psychology a new line of research emerged. sciencedirect.com/science/articl… w/ @kanileke @_helenschmidt_ and X-less Chelsea Helion and Devlin Eckardt.
Causal and Chronological Relationships Predict Memory Organization for Nonlinear Narratives direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-a…
New paper with @sarah_hy_lee, @brynnesherman, and Anna Papafragou, in which we explore how people's mental timelines are shaped by event structure -- using popular TV shows to examine shared memories across months and even *years*! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
I’m excited to announce our new preprint -- Neural codes track prior events in a narrative and predict subsequent memory for details! URL: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… @ptoncompmemlab
One of the lab's original Day 1 "dream" projects is now out as a preprint! Using a custom set of stories with fMRI, we showed that top-down attention can shift mPFC event boundaries to align with different kinds of narrative boundaries biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
I’ll be joining @BBSutdallas @UT_Dallas as an Asst Prof in Jan 2024! Many thanks to my advisors @haxbylab, @IGobbini, Brad Duchaine, colleagues @Dartmouth & all who helped me get here! Interested in #computational #neuroscience #cognition #perception #neuropsychology? Join me! 🧠
Psychological Momentum - Christopher J. Honey, Abhijit Mahabal, Buddhika Bellana, 2023 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
We are excited to announce that we will be having our 4th annual Methods in Neuroscience at Dartmouth Summer School from 8/6-8/16/23 exploring how minds interact. Application deadline is 5/31/2023. mindsummerschool.org
For more on this paper, see also this News & Views from Jordan Suchow! nature.com/articles/s4156…