Coraline Rinn Iordan
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coralineiordan.bsky.social
Coraline Rinn Iordan
@coralineiordan.bsky.social
Assistant Professor @ University of Rochester ◆ narratives, episodic memory, naturalistic cognition, neurofeedback ◆ natcoglab.org ◆ mom ◆ moon elf warlock ◆ 🌈 she/her
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New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Sculpting new visual categories into the human brain | PNAS
Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report an alternate route for humans to a...
www.pnas.org
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4
Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology
Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.
www.nature.com
September 30, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Congratulations, Claire!!! So well deserved! If you're in San Diego this November, be sure to stop by Claire's SfN poster on Saturday 11/15 on how narrative summarization reflects underlying event structure in episodic memory (Poster 042.26/FF11). 🌴🧠⚙️
Congratulations to BCS grad student Claire Sun, recipient of a Society for Neuroscience Trainee Professional Development Award (TPDA), which recognizes trainees who demonstrate scientific merit and excellence in research. @cvsuor.bsky.social @coralineiordan.bsky.social
October 14, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
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.
October 1, 2025 at 10:39 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
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.

1/
September 22, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9
Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications
When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...
doi.org
August 25, 2025 at 9:41 AM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
1/ 🚨 Preprint alert!
How does the brain make sense of continuous experience?
We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall.
👉 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.673233
September 3, 2025 at 1:39 AM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?

Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall.

Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!
Repeated Viewing of a Narrative Movie Changes Event Timescales in The Brain
Many experiences occur repeatedly throughout our lives: we might watch the same movie more than once and listen to the same song on repeat. How does the brain modify its representations of events when...
www.biorxiv.org
September 2, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Excited to present our new work reading minds!

Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6
August 28, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
/1 New preprint alert! 💫“Expertise Shapes the Multidimensional Perception of Stories”! 💫 We generated a novel corpus of improvised spoken stories using diverse prompts designed to elicit creative and complex narrative structure.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
OSF
doi.org
August 25, 2025 at 5:11 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Check out our latest preprint! BlueSky-less Gayathri Subramanian tried combining odor & sound presentation during sleep to shape memories and discovered that multisensory cuing of unassociated memories nullified the benefits of reactivation. @paller.bsky.social
Concurrent presentation of memory-related odors and sounds nullified sleep reactivation benefits
Reactivation of recently acquired memories during sleep supports their longevity. Reactivation can be biased during sleep using odors or sounds through a technique termed targeted memory reactivation ...
biorxiv.org
August 19, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Our study using layer fMRI to study the direction of communication between the hippocampus and cortex during perceptual predictions is finally out in Science Advances! Predicted-but-omitted shapes are represented in CA2/3 and correlate specifically with deep layers of PHC, suggesting feedback. 🧠🟦
Communication of perceptual predictions from the hippocampus to the deep layers of the parahippocampal cortex
High-resolution neuroimaging reveals stimulus-specific predictions sent from hippocampus to the neocortex during perception.
www.science.org
May 22, 2025 at 1:55 AM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Excited to share my first fMRI paper in @pnas.org We found that suppressing the encoding of one event can strengthen the neural representation of the next in CA1, and bias retrieval-related neural restatement away from suppressed information. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Maintenance suppression enhances subsequent associative learning | PNAS
Removing irrelevant information from working memory (WM) can free cognitive resources and reduce interference with current task goals. Beyond these...
www.pnas.org
August 12, 2025 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Successful prediction of the future enhances encoding of the present.

I am so delighted that this work found a wonderful home at Open Mind. The peer review journey was a rollercoaster but it *greatly* improved the paper.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
August 9, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.
Efficient uniform sampling explains non-uniform memory of narrative stories https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.31.667952v1
August 1, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Check out Zaid's open "Podcast" ECoG dataset for natural language comprehension (w/ Hasson Lab). The paper is now out at Scientific Data (nature.com/articles/s41...) and the data are available on OpenNeuro (openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...).
July 7, 2025 at 9:00 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Music is an incredibly powerful retrieval cue. What is the neural basis of music-evoked memory reactivation? And how does this reactivation relate to later memory for the retrieved events? In our new study, we used Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to find out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Music-evoked reactivation during continuous perception is associated with enhanced subsequent recall of naturalistic events
Music is a potent cue for recalling personal experiences, yet the neural basis of music-evoked memory remains elusive. We address this question by using the full-length film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to examine how repeated musical themes reactivate previously encoded events in cortex and shape next-day recall. Participants in an fMRI study viewed either the original film (with repeated musical themes) or a no-music version. By comparing neural activity patterns between these groups, we found that music-evoked reactivation of neural patterns linked to earlier scenes in the default mode network was associated with improved subsequent recall. This relationship was specific to the music condition and persisted when we controlled for a proxy measure of initial encoding strength (spatial intersubject correlation), suggesting that music-evoked reactivation may play a role in making event memories stick that is distinct from what happens at initial encoding. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Institutes of Health, https://ror.org/01cwqze88, F99 NS118740, R01 MH112357
www.biorxiv.org
July 8, 2025 at 2:06 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
🧠 Paper out!

We investigated how hippocampal and cortical ripples support memory during movie watching. We found that:

🎬 Hippocampal ripples mark event boundaries
🧩 Cortical ripples predict later recall

Ripples may help transform real-life experiences into lasting memories!

rdcu.be/eui9l
Movie-watching evokes ripple-like activity within events and at event boundaries
Nature Communications - The neural processes involved in memory formation for realistic experiences remain poorly understood. Here, the authors found that ripple-like activity in the human...
rdcu.be
July 1, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Our new paper out now in Science explores how neural activity in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) *drifts* over time - and *jumps* at key boundaries - to help organize events in memory.

🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here's a quick summary of what we found 🧵👇
June 26, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
I am so excited to share that our paper 'A neural basis for distinguishing imagination from reality' is now published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social! 🧠✨ See thread below! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
June 5, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it.

We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory
Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...
www.biorxiv.org
May 19, 2025 at 9:56 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
New paper out! 🎉 “Evolving Engrams Demand Changes in Effective Cues” (Hippocampus). In this opinion piece, we discuss how retrieval processes can be enhanced and offer an alternative to one of the field’s few enduring principles: encoding specificity. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Evolving Engrams Demand Changes in Effective Cues
A longstanding principle in episodic memory research, known as the encoding specificity hypothesis, holds that an effective retrieval cue should closely match the original encoding conditions. This p...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
May 7, 2025 at 1:07 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
🧠✨How do we rebuild our memories? In our new study, we show that hippocampal ripples kickstart a coordinated expansion of cortical activity that helps reconstruct past experiences.

We recorded iEEG from patients during memory retrieval... and found something really cool 👇(thread)
April 29, 2025 at 6:00 AM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
Proud to announce our primer on "Ten principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience"

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This primer is for beginners to get started, advanced programmers to improve, and PIs.

#psychology #psychsci #cogsci #neuroskyence
Ten principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience - Communications Psychology
Programming is essential for modern research in neuroscience and psychology, but it can quickly become a source of frustration and error. This Primer introduces ten practical principles guiding resear...
www.nature.com
April 15, 2025 at 12:41 PM
Reposted by Coraline Rinn Iordan
New preprint! Excited to share our latest work “Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry” ft. outstanding former undergraduate Chandra Fincke, @glajoie.bsky.social, @krishnaswamylab.bsky.social, and @wutsaiyale.bsky.social's Nick Turk-Browne 1/8
Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to restore and enhance a wide range of human capabilities. However, a barrier to the adoption of BCIs is how long it can take users to learn to control them. W...
doi.org
April 3, 2025 at 11:04 PM