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Jamal A. Williams

@jayneuro.bsky.social
89 followers 60 following 31 posts

Interested in the mechanisms underlying music cognition via neuroimaging & computational modeling Neuroscience PhD at Princeton Neuroscience Postdoc at MIT Incoming Faculty at Northeastern (Fall 2027) scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=RjmK2NgAAAAJ&hl=en

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Jamal A. Williams @jayneuro.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Our new paper is out in Nature Communications! 🎶🧠✨ If you're interested in how the brain represents meaning evoked by music, check it out. Shout out to my Princeton team for making this happen!🚀 @jalon.bsky.social, @margulisa.bsky.social, Karen Christianson, Cara Turnbull, Grace Simmons, Uri Hasson
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Jamal A. Williams @jayneuro.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
✨New Preprint Alert✨ How does the brain integrate long-timescale tonal information during piano performance? 🧠 🎹 Our new preprint shows how default mode, motor, auditory, and visual regions track high-level musical structure during expert performance. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/10)
biorxiv.org
Hierarchical neural integration of musical structure during expert performance
Music, which is organized hierarchically (notes, phrases, sections), provides an ideal model for studying fine-grained motor sequence production. However, it is unknown how musicians’ brains integrate...
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Reposted by Jamal A. Williams
Josh McDermott @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
New pre-print from our lab, by Lakshmi Govindarajan with help from Sagarika Alavilli, introducing a new type of model for studying sensory uncertainty. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here is a summary. (1/n)
biorxiv.org
Task-optimized models of sensory uncertainty reproduce human confidence judgments
Sensory input is often ambiguous, leading to uncertain interpretations of the external world. Estimates of perceptual uncertainty might be useful in guiding behavior, but it remains unclear whether hu...
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Jamal A. Williams @jayneuro.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
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...
biorxiv.org
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
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