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!

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!

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! 🧡

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!

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!

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!

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!

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! 🧠

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! 🧠🧡

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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🧵

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 🧵

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

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 🛝)

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

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...

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.

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? 🤔

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 🧠