Lab Updates


JOSS publishes 2000th paper

The Journal of Open Source Software has just published it’s 2000th birthday, and reached it’s 7th birthday! The journal just put out a blog post providing an overview of the journal’s growth.

Dr. Madan has been an associate editor at the journal since it’s inception in May 2016.


Memory and Consciousness—Usually in Tandem but Sometimes Apart

New paper out in Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology!

“I present three propositions about the relationship between episodic memory and consciousness: (1) Episodic memory is usually associated with conscious retrieval; (2) it is possible to have consciousness without episodic memory; and (3) episodic memory can be accessed without conscious retrieval.”


Memory and beliefs: How our past experiences shape what we remember

Dr. Madan will be giving a talk at this year’s British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN) meeting as part of a symposium on Affect-driven learning and information seeking.

“Affective states shape how individuals seek information, form memories, and consequently remember information across development. Understanding the individual differences and physiological underpinnings of affective processes is essential for enhancing healthy information seeking and decision making in real life. This symposium brings together researchers investigating how past decisions, social contexts, rewards, and curiosity influence learning and information seeking.”


Dr. RuoChong Zhang

Congratulations to RuoChong Zhang on a successful PhD defense!


Dr. Yashoda Gopi

Congratulations to Yashoda Gopi on a successful PhD defense!


Call for papers: Methods and Application in Fractal Analysis of Neuroimaging Data

Dr. Madan is co-editing a special issue at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience:

“The high complexity of the human brain inherently underpins the incredible variety of cognitive, motor, and sensory functions. Measuring such complexity may help define a comprehensive feature able to represent the general organization of the brain. Fractal analysis is a framework able to represent highly complex structures or signals and gives complementary and powerful tools for capturing and quantifying brain complexity.”


Call for papers: Cognitive biases in decision making

Dr. Madan is co-editing a special issue at Humanities and Social Science Communications:

“Cognitive shortcuts (or heuristics) and their consequent psychological and behavioural biases can profoundly affect and shape the judgments and decisions we make in our everyday and professional lives. The causes of bias are varied, can be both implicit or explicit, and socially or culturally learned. They may include a lack of regard for statistics and evidence, and environmental factors that compete for our attention. Undoubtedly, cognitive bias is a major contributor to errors, misjudgements and disagreement in many settings.”


Memory rehabilitation: Restorative, specific knowledge acquisition, compensatory, and holistic approaches

New review paper published, led by Yashoda Gopi.

“Here, we review the literature on four approaches for memory rehabilitation and their associated strategies: (1) the restorative approach, aimed at a return to pre-morbid functioning, (2) the knowledge acquisition approach, involving training on specific information relevant to daily life, (3) the compensatory approach, targeted at improving daily functioning, and (4) the holistic approach, in which social, emotional, and behavioral deficits are addressed alongside cognitive consequences of acquired brain injury.”


Psychological Science Open Science Advisor

Dr. Madan has recently begun as as one of three inagural Open Science Advisors at Psychological Science.


Scan Once, Analyse Many: Using Large Open-Access Neuroimaging Datasets to Understand the Brain

A special issue in Neuroinformatics is now out, including a paper by Dr. Madan providing an overview of many large neuroimaging datasets.


Academia and the World Beyond

“Academia and the World Beyond: Navigating Life after a PhD” is out! If you’ve ever been asked “What will you do after?” and been unsure what to say, this book is for you!

Dr. Madan interviewed 22 people with PhDs in both academic and non-academic careers. What did they study, what do they do now, how did they transition, what advice do they have for current PhD students. Also great for supervisors in knowing more about the options and current job market.


Biased confabulation in risky choice

New paper out in Cognition, led by Alice Mason.

“In three pre-registered experiments, we presented people with risky options, where the outcomes were drawn from continuous ranges (e.g., 100–190 or 500–590), and then assessed their memories for the outcomes experienced. […] people were very poor at recalling the exact outcomes encountered, but rather confabulated outcomes that were consistent with the outcomes they had seen and were biased towards the more extreme ranges encountered.”