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Icon-lab @IconLaboratory

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

Joined December 2022
  • Tweets 73
  • Following 178
  • Followers 184
17 Photos and videos
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
Feb 12
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.
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Congrats to @Xinchi_Yu on contributing an Editor’s Choice article 🎉 - a well-deserved recognition! 👏
APA Journals@APA_Journals
20 Oct 2025
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: bit.ly/4nxS3AF
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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 doi.org/10.1093/brain/awaf39…
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Icon-lab retweeted
Dr. Susan Rivera 🇵🇷@srivera_tw
8 Oct 2025
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 ... go.umd.edu/xieBBRF25
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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. doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001347 @APA_Journals
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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 🦀🎓.
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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 (@vishnusreekumar@masto.ai)@vishnusreekr
25 Jun 2025
Replying to @vishnusreekr
Also of particular relevance: recent work by @IconLaboratory & @WilmaBainbridge shows some words are consistently more retrievable across people in cued recall: nature.com/articles/s41562-0…. 4/n
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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:shorturl.at/JYMu7
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Dr. Susan Rivera 🇵🇷@srivera_tw
21 Apr 2025
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! go.umd.edu/xiesearle25
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🎉 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! 🧠🔬✨ bsos.umd.edu/featured-conten…
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Xinchi Yu@Xinchi_Yu
7 Feb 2025
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.
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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 doi.org/10.1002/hipo.23678
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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. 🧠🔍 link.springer.com/article/10…
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nature
@Nature
18 Oct 2024
Nature research paper: Neuronal sequences in population bursts encode information in human cortex go.nature.com/48c4YRP

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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_
18 Oct 2024
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? 🧠✨ nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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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
16 Oct 2024
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: nature.com/articles/s41586-0… #NeuralCoding #HumanCognition
A sample activity plot of 152 neurons recorded in the anterior temporal lobe over time. In response to visual images in four categories (animal, object, place, and person), neuronal units fire close together creating spike bursts. The precise timing of neuronal activity within these population bursts varies across the different stimulus categories.

ALT A sample activity plot of 152 neurons recorded in the anterior temporal lobe over time. In response to visual images in four categories (animal, object, place, and person), neuronal units fire close together creating spike bursts. The precise timing of neuronal activity within these population bursts varies across the different stimulus categories.

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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. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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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.
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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!
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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
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