iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Our postdoctoral researcher Mengcun Gao studies how we build a picture of the world out of the patterns in our experience 🧠 How do learners pick out what matters, organize what they find, and generalize beyond what they've directly seen? She'll be presenting at #psynom26 in November!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Classes start today at @utaustin.bsky.social! The lab is back to a full house, our RAs are back on the schedule, and we've got a semester's worth of questions we're excited to start answering. Welcome back, y'all! 🤘🧠

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Today we're highlighting our amazing Research Associate Nicole Varga! 🧠 Her work investigates how the brain processes overlapping experiences, whether it links them or holds them apart, and how that changes as we grow up. If you're at #APA2026, drop by her talk tomorrow!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

We're hiring professional track faculty in Psychology at UT Austin! Two Asst/Assoc Professor of Instruction positions & one Clinical Asst/Assoc Professor position for a licensed clinical psychologist. Instruction: apply.interfolio.com/188637 Clinical: apply.interfolio.com/188633 Please share!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Today is Sara's last day in the lab & we're going to miss her! Sara built the systems that keep our lab running, including the work behind our big adolescent brain study. She'll be managing projects in local government & we couldn't be more thrilled for her. Thank you, Sara! 🧡

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

We'll be at @umlaufsculpture.bsky.social Family Day this Sunday! Stop by our table to explore hands-on science activities & learn more about our work. Whether you're a curious kid, a budding scientist, or love learning something new, we want to meet you! Join us for a day of art, nature & STEAM!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

2️⃣ And we're sending off Dr. Owen Friend, who is headed to JP Morgan Chase as an Applied AI/ML Associate. He's taking his work on how people learn and remember into studying how we interact with AI tools. Thank you for everything, Owen! We'll miss you!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Two milestones in the Preston Lab this week 🎉 1️⃣ Andrei Amatuni defended his dissertation proposal! His work asks how we learn the hidden structure of experience & use it to reason in new situations + how that ability develops from childhood to adulthood. Congrats, Andrei!

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Reposted by Alison Preston

Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

We're recruiting postdocs to study how people build structured knowledge from experience & use it to act flexibly. Behavioral work, fMRI, computational & AI models, with a lifespan focus. You don't need experience with every method; fit & curiosity matter most. Please repost & share! 🧠

Preston Lab, University of Texas at Austin. Now recruiting 1–2 postdoctoral researchers in learning, memory, development, and flexible behavior. Methods: behavioral experiments, fMRI, computational modeling, and naturalistic stimuli. Apply with CV, research statement, and 3 references to apreston@utexas.edu. Photos show the lab group smiling together, members working at a table, and members at a celebration.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Mentorship works best when we stop expecting one person to do all the mentoring. We talk about needing "a mentor," singular. But a better model is constellation mentoring: a set of relationships that together give us what we need, shifting as we do. We all need a constellation!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

When you're stressed, what happens to the mental links that let you connect related experiences and draw new conclusions? In our new @science.org #ScienceAdvances paper, we show that stress disrupts that linking process in the hippocampus🧵

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

As the school year ends, we want to thank our incredible Research Assistants for all their hard work and dedication throughout the year. We're so grateful to have such an amazing team. Thank you for everything you’ve done this year — we can’t wait to see all that you accomplish next! 🧠🧡

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Welcome to Emily Powell, our newest research coordinator! Emily joins us from UT Austin and will be central to our NIH-funded BrainWave Project, studying how memory changes through adolescence and shapes how we decide, reason, and learn. So glad to have you, Emily!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Proud mentor moment! My student @mujianing.bsky.social (co-supervised w/ @alexanderhuth.bsky.social) presents at #CEMS2026 today. Her work challenges the idea that event boundaries are remembered because they're surprising. What predicts memory is how much a moment shares with the rest of the story.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Really enjoyed giving yesterday's #TAMeG2026 keynote & joining @barense.bsky.social, @efriskouw.bsky.social & Ike Okafor on the mentorship panel. Things that have stuck with me: 🪟 Mentorship needs transparency 📣 It needs advocacy beyond advice 🔁 Mentors learn from mentees too

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Thank you Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest for hosting me at Grand Rounds, and to the trainees for a great lunch beforehand. They study brain health in aging, so it was fun to bring work from the other end of the lifespan. So many parallels & divergences in memory across development and aging!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Overall, we find that stress may bias the brain toward preserving separate episodes rather than building the connected knowledge that supports inference, generalization, and flexible thinking.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Under stress, two things happened in the hippocampus: 1) Less reactivation of the prior related memory during new learning 2) Greater neural dissimilarity between overlapping events To put it another way, stress pushed related memories apart instead of pulling them together.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Stress didn't impair learning of the directly experienced pairs; all participants remembered A-B and B-C just fine. But stressed participants struggled to infer A-C. Their memory was fine, but stress disrupted their ability to link the related experiences.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

We asked what happens to this linking under stress. Participants learned A-B pairs on Day 1. The next day, half went through a stress task before learning overlapping B-C pairs. Then we tested the extent to which they could infer A-C.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Our memories aren't isolated. We're constantly linking separate experiences that share common elements, building structures that let us infer things we were never directly taught.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Spatial cognition has been the theme at CRaNE 2026 @crane-navsci.bsky.social today. Loved @russellepstein.bsky.social's keynote on how the brain builds cognitive maps. Looking forward to my panel tomorrow with Danny Dilks & @noranewcombe.bsky.social on how spatial cognition develops!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

One thing I wish we talked about more explicitly with #earlycareer faculty is how gradually the pool of people who'll write their tenure letters develops. Impressions form slowly over the pre-tenure years, which makes visibility much easier to build over time than to manufacture later.

nfographic titled "Building Visibility in the Pre-Tenure Years." Four rows, each pairing an observation on the left with a corresponding action on the right.
Row one. Observation: the tenure-letter pool forms gradually. The pool of people who may eventually write tenure letters is not formed in year five, it develops gradually across the pre-tenure years. Action: build visibility early. By the time a tenure case is assembled, many scholars have already formed impressions through talks, preprints, grants, and conversations. Pull quote: "Start in year one, not when tenure is approaching."
Row two. Observation: visibility is not just networking. The goal is not to collect contacts. The goal is for the right people to understand your questions, your trajectory, and your contributions. Action: make the work legible. Help others understand what problems you are trying to solve and how your work is changing the conversation. Pull quote: "Who should understand your work, and why?"
Row three. Observation: impressions build through substantive engagement. Conference talks, seminars, preprints, workshops, panels, and study sections all help others see how you think. Action: share ideas consistently. Visibility grows through repeated, substantive forms of engagement. Strong work matters, but it also has to be visible and legible to the field. Pull quote: "Share ideas early and often."
Row four. Observation: sponsorship carries real weight. Senior faculty can help make visibility possible by opening doors to the conversations where reputations are formed. Action: turn mentorship into sponsorship. Nominate early-career colleagues for talks and panels. Introduce them to people who should know their work. Pull quote: "Small acts of sponsorship can carry real weight.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

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Reposted by Alison Preston

Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Children get better at reasoning from memory as they grow up. But is it the same brain process getting stronger, or something more fundamental changing? In our new paper, we use fMRI and computational modeling to test that question directly 🧵

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Overall, these experiments reveal that children and adults can both reason successfully from memory, but the brain gets there by completely different means as it develops Read the full paper here: doi.org/10.64898/202...

doi.org

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

In adults, the angular gyrus organized memories by their shared relational structure, and the pattern of activity reflected the relationships between experiences rather than the experiences themselves. That relational organization is what made direct retrieval possible.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

But in adults, activity in the angular gyrus predicted a faster, more direct route to the answer. The angular gyrus helps organize knowledge by its relational structure rather than episodic detail, and adults could draw on that directly. Children didn't show this pattern.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Across both age groups, the hippocampus played a critical role during memory-based inference, stitching together separate memories to reach the correct answer.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

We scanned children (7–12) and adults in an fMRI while they completed an inference task. We used computational modeling of their response times to identify which mechanism was actually driving successful inference.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

The @simonsfoundation.org Triangle Program funds multi-year partnerships between scientists & artists. The next call opens later this year & is worth a look if you're interested in combining science & art! More here: www.simonsfoundation.org/science-soci...

simonsfoundation.org

Science, Society & Culture | Triangle Program

The Science, Society & Culture division’s Triangle Program joins scientists with artists and producers on projects at the intersections of art and science.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

It's one of the clearest examples I've seen of what happens when scientists & artists collaborate. Science explains the structure, but art makes it something you can feel or walk into.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Artist Jiabao Li, mathematician Fumiko Futamura & Fusebox director Ron Berry designed playground structures from mathematical functions where kids can literally climb through the math.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

What comes to mind when you hear "math playground"? Because at a @simonsfoundation.org gathering for the Fusebox Festival this past weekend, I saw a literal one (more in thread 🛝)

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Come find us this Sunday at #ThinkeryATX's Spring into STEAM event! Stop by the Preston Lab table to learn about our research, try a hands-on brain challenge, and hear what it's like to work in a neuroscience lab. Learn more here: thinkeryaustin.org/steam-sunday

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

The Preston Lab is at the 2026 Girls in STEM Conference with #Girlstart this weekend! Two of our lab members are speaking to 4th–8th grade girls about their paths in science & what research looks like day-to-day. Proud to support this event! More here: girlstart.org/our-programs...

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Read both papers here 👇 Research Paper: doi.org/10.1080/1524... Review: doi.org/10.1016/j.dc...

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

These insights are especially important in legal settings, where children are often asked for precise temporal details. Understanding where a child is in their development means we can meet them there & make sure we're evaluating their memory fairly, not through an adult lens ⚖️

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

So it's important to keep in mind that children aren't just underdeveloped adults; their brains literally do things differently. When a child struggles to say exactly when something happened, it's not about credibility. It's about the stage of brain development they're in.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Children start with local, event-specific memories. Broader temporal patterns form as the hippocampus & its connections mature through adolescence. By adulthood, the brain can flexibly access specific details & general patterns depending on what the situation calls for.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

This was part of a growing picture suggesting the field needed a unified account of how these abilities develop together. So we returned to the literature & proposed one: a three-stage framework grounded in how the hippocampus & frontoparietal regions mature across development.

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

First, we asked kids & adults (7-25) to describe a typical day. We found that younger kids narrated events in sequence, whereas older kids anchored experiences in routines & time patterns. But kids who managed their time more independently also showed richer temporal memory? 🤔

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

How children remember time changes dramatically as they grow up & understanding that shift matters more than you might think. Two new papers from the lab's newest PhD, Dr. Owen Friend, explore what that difference looks like & what it tells us about the developing brain 🧠

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

The Preston Lab has a new doctor in the house! 🥂🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Owen Friend, who defended his dissertation today. Seven studies in four years, all on how children remember when things happen. His committee called it the best defense talk they'd ever seen. We're so proud!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

We’re hiring a full-time Research Coordinator in the Preston Lab at UT Austin (start May/June 2026). Work on behavioral + fMRI studies of how memory & decision-making develop from childhood to adulthood. Learn more & apply: preston.clm.utexas.edu/news/join-th... Please repost!

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Alison Preston @aliprestonphd.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

One of the most valuable things trainees can see is how scientists think through uncertainty. We do this each year at #MPMD. Each PI brings a question instead of a talk—and we work through it together. I hope others consider this format created by Simona Ghetti, hosted this year by Jeni Pathman.

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