Brock Kirwan

New paper! We tested mnemonic discrimination at extended delays in healthy young adults and an amnesic patient and found that when target memories are strong similar lures are more likely to be mistakenly called "old" and less-similar lures are correctly rejected. However... doi.org/10.1002/hipo...

sensitive to target-lure similarity, even at 1-week delay in healthy young adults and after a 1-day delay in a patient with hippocampal damage. Many thanks to commenters on the earlier preprint and to the reviewers (sincerely, they made this version better). bsky.app/profile/broc...

New paper! We tested mnemonic discrimination at extended delays in healthy young adults and an amnesic patient and found that when target memories are strong similar lures are more likely to be mistakenly called "old" and less-similar lures are correctly rejected. However... doi.org/10.1002/hipo...

In honor of International Left-Handers Day, we have an updated preprint on scanning left-handed participants in fMRI studies. Although they're 11% of the population, we routinely screen LH people out of fMRI studies due to concerns about functional lateralization 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Activation maps overlap considerably between an all-RH sample and samples including 10% LH (representative of the population prevalence), with dice similarity > 0.8 for all samples with n≥30. Conclusion: you should be including left-handed folks in your fMRI studies (at least for memory). 6/n

In honor of International Left-Handers Day, we have an updated preprint on scanning left-handed participants in fMRI studies. Although they're 11% of the population, we routinely screen LH people out of fMRI studies due to concerns about functional lateralization 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

right-lateralized language (as determined with a language localizer task) and compared with everyone else. Right-lateralized LH participants had more activation in the right hemisphere for word retrieval. Notably, they did not have any less activation in the left hemisphere than RH. 4/n

In honor of International Left-Handers Day, we have an updated preprint on scanning left-handed participants in fMRI studies. Although they're 11% of the population, we routinely screen LH people out of fMRI studies due to concerns about functional lateralization 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Language processing happens in the left hemisphere for most folks but it's more frequently right-lateralized in LH. This is obviously a concern if you're doing an fMRI study on language, but why screen out LH's in a memory study? This was lead-author Loriana Goulding's question. She recruited 2/n

New Preprint! Have you ever wondered if there's a relationship between the prestige of an author's institution and the sample size of their fMRI study? We did, so we did a systematic review of the memory fMRI literature and found the opposite of what we predicted www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The one thing that we found to be associated with prestige was journal impact factor--higher prestige predicted higher impact factors. I have theories about why this might be (perhaps pressure to publish in high-IF journals at some institutions), but we'd need to do an intervention to say more.

New Preprint! Have you ever wondered if there's a relationship between the prestige of an author's institution and the sample size of their fMRI study? We did, so we did a systematic review of the memory fMRI literature and found the opposite of what we predicted www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We thought that authors from higher prestige universities might get a break on the number of subjects needed to publish an fMRI study. In fact, the opposite is true--higher prestige is associated with larger sample sizes.

Preprint day! Mnemonic discrimination is required to keep overlapping or similar experiences from interfering with each other in memory. We've done a lot of work on how this happens at short delays, but we've never examined this process at longer delays, like over a week osf.io/preprints/ps...

As targets are forgotten over a week, this pattern becomes more pronounced. All this indicates that mnemonic discrimination performance depends on both the strength of the target memory and the similarity of the lure to the original target.

Preprint day! Mnemonic discrimination is required to keep overlapping or similar experiences from interfering with each other in memory. We've done a lot of work on how this happens at short delays, but we've never examined this process at longer delays, like over a week osf.io/preprints/ps...

We found people forget! Which of course we were expecting (Ebbinghaus showed the forgetting curve in 1885). What's interesting is that as people forget the original targets, their responses to the similar lures change in interesting ways. When target memory is strong, people are able to discriminate

Preprint day! Mnemonic discrimination is required to keep overlapping or similar experiences from interfering with each other in memory. We've done a lot of work on how this happens at short delays, but we've never examined this process at longer delays, like over a week osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper! Emerging adults with type 1 diabetes have been shown to have poorer executive control and working memory performance compared to controls. With Chad Jensen's lab we examined executive control in emerging adults with T1D using fMRI. 1/3

We found T1D S's demonstrated similar behavioral inhibition performance to controls but comparatively greater activation in several interconnected executive functioning-related brain regions. We did not find an association between hemoglobin HbAlc and executive function-related neural activation 2/3