Nina Rouhani
@ninarouhani
assistant professor @usc, postdoc @caltech, cognitive neuroscience phd @princeton. no longer here! see: https://bsky.app/profile/ninarouhani.bsky.social
I will be recruiting 💫two PhD students💫 for my new lab! (computational learning & memory applied to individual & interactive behavior, rouhanilab.com). Feel free to e-mail if interested and catch me at SfN! (poster 06 at 1 PM on Wed 10/09)

We are seeking a full-time Research Specialist to become a LUMeNary @EmoryPsychology in Summer 2025! ✨ Applications accepted here: staff-emory.icims.com/jobs/141227/job And feel free to reach out to me!
Excited to announce that I'll be starting a lab at the University of Montreal (psychology) and Mila (Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms) starting summer 2025. More info to come soon, but I'll be recruiting grad students. Please share / get in touch if you're interested!
👀🍟Now out in Cognitive Science 😋🤖 We present a new approach that combines cognitive models and neural networks to predict latent preferences. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/co…
I'm extremely excited to launch the relational cognition lab at UC Irvine: relcoglab.org We study learning and memory in mind, brains and machines. I am open to collaborations and hiring a lab technician in January 2025 (job ad soon). Reach out to chat!
Preprint for "Consolidation of Sequential Planning" with @evanrussek and @NeilBurgess10. We demonstrate the neural representations supporting sequential planning and the effect of memory consolidation upon them: biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…. As talk, see also: youtube.com/watch?v=0QcNtz…
This is finally out, after so many years in the making! 🥹🥹 We have a new paper out in PNAS today! "Aligning the smiles of dating dyads causally increases attraction" ❤️ @PNASNews A thread... 🧵🧵
It took a while, but this paper with @nathanieldaw is now published in @NatureComms. Reviewers had many good comments, so lots of new stuff here, especially on the computational mechanisms of how people dissociate volatility from stochasticity: nature.com/articles/s4146…
New preprint with @nathanieldaw: Humans can distinguish volatility (rate of change or diffusion noise) & moment-to-moment stochasticity (or observation noise) and adjust their learning adaptively. As theoretically expected, these have opposite effects on humans' learning rate.
When we anticipate the future, the brain shows graded representations of the future & past. The scale of these representations increases systematically from lower- to higher-order regions. Proud of this work by @hannahtstoll, a collab w/ @ChrisBaldassano! nature.com/articles/s4146…
🚨New work on the influence of early-life adversity on agency & reinforcement learning! w/ @thephelpslab, Kate McLaughlin, & Bryan Dong (1/2)
Special Focus recognizing the outsized influence on memory research of Sarah DuBrow doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a…
1/10 Very excited to announce that my thesis project is now a preprint! We present the first detailed study of mental imagery in human ventral temporal cortex, bringing together the interests of @doristsao and @UeliRutishauser. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Just out! 🗞️ * How RL and WM interact when actions can lead to reward or to punishment * A striking lack of learning and retention diffs as a function of depr/anxiety and rumin symptoms * An RL but not S-R module captured retention patterns psyarxiv.com/82pyz
We are delighted to share that our new paper published today in @NeuroCellPress! We show that the persistent activity of single neurons during working memory (WM) maintenance predicts long-term memory (LTM) formation in the human hippocampus. 👇cell.com/neuron/fulltex…
Excited to share a new project! 🎉🎉 doi.org/10.1101/2024.0… How do we navigate between brain states when we switch tasks? Are dynamics driven by control, or passive decay of the prev task? To answer, we compare high-dim linear dynamical systems fit to EEG and RNNs🌀 ⏬
I’m thrilled to see this out now, & couldn’t be happier that it landed in TiCS! I already wrote a 🧵on the positive case I’m making (below). I want to briefly elaborate on the negative case: why the status quo on goals & value is in need of a new account. From my conclusion:
Our paper on the Affective Gradient Hypothesis is now out on @TrendsCognSci! 🧠 ➡️sciencedirect.com/science/articl… For a short summary of how this theory originated and what it proposes, see this 🧵:
The @IMaC_Lab is presenting new findings on rapid plasticity in the human brain 🧠⚡️ at #SfN24! Want to learn more on how we decode which movies people have watched from changes in brain microstructure? And how fast such changes occur? Come visit our posters on on Tuesday 8-12!
📣 I'll be recruiting PhD students for Fall 2025. Take a look at the lab website and the FAQ for prospective students: piraylab.com/join Feel free to reach out if you have questions.
Come check out our lab's @SfNtweets posters!!! see thread -->
I will be recruiting a PhD student this upcoming cycle, so if you have motivated students interested in modeling memory and the brain, please send them my way (email: [email protected])! Memory Optimization Lab information: sites.rutgers.edu/memory-optimiz…