Dissociable mechanisms for learning generalities and event details

October 21, 2024

Real-world decisions require understanding generalities and the ability to remember specific events. For instance, an art student might learn both the general painting style of JMW Turner and specific locations of each of his major works. In a new publication, we show that discriminating between broad categories versus individual events benefit from different learning sequences. ... Read more » Dissociable mechanisms for learning generalities and event details

Lab awarded new NIH grant!

October 19, 2024

The lab received a new 5-year NIH grant to study how changes in hippocampus and frontoparietal cortex from adolescence to emerging adulthood impact knowledge acquisition and reasoning. Reach out if you are an interested student or postdoctoral fellow who wants to get involved in the research. ... Read more » Lab awarded new NIH grant!

Undergraduate Research Assistant Application

May 20, 2024

Interested in becoming a Volunteer Research Assistant with the Preston Lab? You can apply to one of our RA positions using this link: https://forms.gle/oXB2muVabkpkpFj17   Please note that the Preston Lab accepts Research Assistants on a rolling basis, depending on the needs of our lab during a given period of time. Due to the volume of applicants we receive, you will only be contacted if your application is selected to move on to the next round. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to our Lab Manager, Sara Abbas, at saabbas@austin.utexas.edu ... Read more » Undergraduate Research Assistant Application

Congratulations Ayesha!

March 27, 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Ayesha Nadiadwala for successfully defending her dissertation today! Ayesha joined the Preston Lab as a graduate student in Fall 2019. Co-mentored with Dr. Preston and Dr. Joey Dunsmoor, Ayesha spent her time as a graduate student at UT Austin exploring how different episodic memory processes are modulated by emotion. More specifically, she was interested in learning how emotion influences relationships between memory representations for events. Congratulations Ayesha! ... Read more » Congratulations Ayesha!

How the brain connects related experiences

June 9, 2023

In our new paper at Cerebral Cortex, we find that the brain may connect related experiences by reactivating semantic knowledge in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and integrating knowledge about both experiences in the hippocampus. Follow this link to check out the paper! ... Read more » How the brain connects related experiences

What bias’ how we make decisions in time?

May 3, 2023

Our new paper at Cerebral Cortex finds that representations of space in the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) bias how we make decisions in time, demonstrating out ability to generalize knowledge across cognitive domains. Check out the paper here.  ... Read more » What bias’ how we make decisions in time?