How are humans capable of maintaining detailed pictures in memory? We sometimes implicitly differentiate memories away from each other to reduce confusion. However, this separation can lead memories to be recalled as biased away from other memory items, termed repulsion bias. We find that repulsion bias can reflect a mnemonic phenomenon, distinct from previous perceptually driven repulsion bias, and that this mnemonic repulsion bias is ongoing during maintenance and dependent on attention to internally maintained memory items. We further reveal contexts where stronger attention during maintenance increases repulsion bias.

Participants memorized real-world, colored objects in a long-term memory experiment, unaware that most objects shared the same color. Later, when asked to report the colors of the studied objects, participants reported around the most common color despite having no knowledge of such regularities (swap errors). Subtler shift errors were also observed either towards (attraction) or away (repulsion) from the most common color dependent on the distance in color space between the true color and the most common color.

Frontiers for Young Minds is a journal geared towards young children (ages 8-15) where the children are the reviewers (along with a mentor adult)! This paper uses the EduCortex educational tool to explain neuroscience concepts such as functional specialization and what a brain map is.

EduCortex is an educational browser-based visualization tool that allows the user to enter any functional or anatomical term (e.g., “visual”, “face”, “precuneus”) and visualize the parts of the brain that are most associated with that term. The process can also be reversed, where the user can click anywhere on the brain to see what terms are most associated with the selected brain region. Using principal components analysis, we also display the functional terms that explained the most variance across all activation maps. This tool works through the combination of Neurosynth, a large-scale, automated database of fMRI papers, and PyCortex, an interactive 3D brain visualizer. This tool was mostly made over the course of 1 week during NeuroHackademy 2019.

Recognition-induced forgetting is the category-specific forgetting of pictures that occurs when a subset of a category of pictures is recognized, leading to forgetting of the remaining pictures. This is the first demonstration that recognition-induced forgetting operates over perceptually distinct objects, demonstrating the ubiquity of such forgetting. These results offer an alternative interpretation for evidence that recognition-induced forgetting does not operate over episodic memory representations.

Object-based attention can be more or less efficient depending on the inferred size of the object. It takes longer for attention to spread across a 10-inch picture of a car compared to a 10-inch picture of an eraser. These findings have important implications for models of attentional control and invite sensitivity to object size for future studies that use real-world images in psychological research.