Dr. Jingyi Wang’s work, titled “The intrinsic time tracker: temporal context is embedded in entorhinal and hippocampal functional connectivity patterns.”, was published in Nature Communications today! Using resting-state fMRI collected daily in two dense sampling studies, this work showed that entorhinal- and hippocampal-whole brain resting functional connectivity patterns systematically drift across a 30-day period, tracking or reflecting the time elapsed between fMRI sessions, thus revealing a spontaneous neural signature of the passage of time in humans. This temporal drift followed an anterior-to-posterior gradient along the hippocampus, and was stronger in the anterolateral (vs. posteromedial) entorhinal cortex, suggesting distinct temporal dynamics across these regions. Congratulations Jingyi and collaborators!
Mengsi gives talk at BAMM
Mengsi Li presented her work titled “The Interplay between Temporal Memory Coding and Affect Dynamics” at the Bay Area Memory Meeting (BAMM) held in Davis, CA. Mengsi’s work was featured as a flash talk, which Mengsi masterfully delivered at the conference. Congratulations, Mengsi!!
Parker Barandon and Yuyue Jiang honored with 2025 Morgan Awards
Congratulations to Parker Barandon, winner of the Morgan Award for Research Promise! This honor is awarded to an undergraduate who demonstrates exceptional potential in experimental research. We are excited to welcome Parker to the LEAP lab as a lab assistant.
Congratulations to Yuyue (Frances) Jiang, winner of the Morgan Award for Academic Excellence! This award is presented to graduating seniors in recognition of outstanding scholarship. Yuyue will be joining Dr. Diego Pizzagalli’s Institute for Translational Depression as a lab assistant this fall.
Congratulations to LEAP Neuro lab's graduating seniors!
Congratulations to our incredible research assistants Anna Sofia Guerra (Distinction in major), Claire Hernandez (Distinction in major, URCA award winner), Cooper Emery, Denis Shrestha, Emily Cohen (Distinction in major, URCA award winner), Parker Barandon (Morgan Award for Research Promise), Rebecca Little, Sukari Linde-Goodfellow, and Yuyue (Frances) Jiang (Morgan Award for Academic Excellence, URCA award winner) on their graduation from UCSB in the class of 2025! We will miss you!
Lapate elected as a member of the Memory Disorders Research Society
Dr. Lapate was elected as a member of the Memory Disorders Research Society (MDRS), a professional society devoted to the study of memory. MDRS was founded in 1988, and members meet once annually each Fall. Membership is by invitation only, and Dr. Lapate is thrilled to attend the upcoming annual meeting, which will be held in Montreal, Canada, in October. Congratulations, Dr. Lapate!
Upcoming SfN minisymposium on emotion and time coding
A minisymposium titled “Representation of Time in the Brain”, featuring Dr. Lapate’s and our lab’s work and led by Dr. Sze Kwok, has been accepted for presentation at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, to be held in San Diego, CA, in November. As part of this minisymposium, Dr. Lapate will give a talk titled: “Memory for time and emotion: reciprocal interactions and neural mechanisms” showcasing recent research done by the LEAP Neuro Lab. Stay tuned!
Mengsi gives talk at CNS!
Mengsi Li presented her work titled “The Interplay between Temporal Memory Coding and Affect Dynamics” at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) held in Boston, MA. Mengsi’s work was featured as a ‘conference highlight’ and promoted to a flash talk, which Mengsi masterfully delivered on the first day of the conference. Congratulations, Mengsi!!
Jingyi’s emotional event boundary study published in Cognition & Emotion
Dr. Jingyi’s Wang’s new work testing whether and how emotional event boundaries modulate temporal memory was published in Cognition and Emotion (Wang & Lapate, 2024) as part of a Special Issue on ‘Emotional time travel: The role of emotion in temporal memory’ edited by Drs. Daniela Palombo and Deborah Talmi. Here, Jingyi found that while a sequence of negative events produces relative temporal compression compared to a sequence of neutral events, neutral-to-negative event transitions dilated subjectively remembered time in memory (compared to negative-to-neutral transitions); moreover, the extent to which individuals showed this ‘temporal dilation’ effect by the onset of negative events correlated with trait variation in mood and anxiety symptomatology. Congratulations, Jingyi!
Check out Jingyi’s work here:
And the thoughtful introduction to this special issue (with a cool drawing of Jingyi’s findings) by Drs. Palombo and Talmi here:
New lab paper on intertemporal discounting, temporal orientation, and anorexia nervosa risk
A new collaborative study co-led by Isabel Schuman, Jingyi Wang and Ian C. Ballard has been published in Scientific Reports. The paper, titled "Willing to wait: Anorexia nervosa symptomatology is associated with higher future orientation and reduced intertemporal discounting" investigated individuals from a community sample at high risk for anorexia nervosa. We found that individuals with higher anorexia nervosa symptomatology valued delayed rewards more and showed a greater focus on future consequences in their daily decision-making compared to a low-symptom group. These findings suggest that a future-oriented cognitive style may contribute to reduced intertemporal discounting often-reported in individuals with anorexia nervosa. Check out the full paper here:
Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) grant renewed
Our collaborative grant with Dr. Scott Grafton (UCSB PI) and Dr. Peter Strick (PI) on emotion-motor interactions for the study of Parkinson’s disease was successfully renewed! This multi-institutional grant will continue to support our affective neuroscience work centered on emotionally-motivated action for two additional years–including work led by LEAP Neuro lab postdoc Jingyi Wang and graduate student Joanne Stasiak (in collaboration with Neil Dundon, Liz Rizor, and others). Congratulations, team!
LEAP Neuro lab presents at SfN
Mengsi Li presented her work titled “Functional organization of lateral prefrontal cortex during time-emotion integration” and Joanne Stasiak presented her work titled “Integrated representations of threat and action control in the human frontal pole” at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience held in Chicago, IL.
Lapate elected a Fellow of the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
Dr. Lapate was elected a Fellow of the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM). CNLM Fellows, who are nominated and elected by CNLM members, represent one of the world’s top think tanks in neuroscience who are “revolutionizing our understanding of the brain and its disorders, creating innovative neurotechnologies, and improving brain health on a global scale.” Congratulations Dr. Lapate!
New TMS system is setup!
The lab recently welcomed experts from Magstim and Brainsight to install and provide training on our new transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system.
Mengsi’s study on retrospective emotion and temporal memory published in Emotion!
Mengsi Li’s new work on retrospective emotion biases and temporal memory was accepted in Emotion! This work, titled ‘The emotion filmmaker: Temporal memory, time–emotion integration, and affective style’ examined whether well documented biases in retrospective emotion (such as peak-end effects; Fredrickson & Kahneman 1993) are related to intra- and inter-individual variation in temporal memory capacity. We also examined whether trait-like individual differences in emotional functioning (such as mood and anxiety disorder symptoms) were related to retrospective emotion or temporal memory processes.
Check out this work here:
Welcome Sydney Fortner!
Sydney joins the LEAP Neuro lab from Dartmouth College (‘24) where she earned a BA in Neuroscience and Anthropology and studied face perception. In the LEAP Neuro lab, Sydney will work on fMRI projects examining temporal coding of emotional experiences. Welcome Sydney–we are thrilled to have you!
Mengsi attends the Timing Research Forum Summer School in Greece
Mengsi Li was selected to attend the Timing Research Forum (TRF) Summer School in Chios, Greece. There, multidisciplinary teams from psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and computational sciences joined forces to meet the challenges of studying time perception and advance our knowledge on timing. Congratulations, Mengsi!
Lapate gives talk at the Neurobiology of Cognition Gordon Research Conference
Dr. Lapate gave an invited talk, titled "Time and Emotion Integration in the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex” at the Neurobiology of Cognition Gordon Research Conference in New Hampshire.
Runan Wang off to start her PhD at UMiami
Runan Wang, who started in the LEAP Neuro lab as an undergraduate assistant in 2021 and stayed as a lab manager for the past 2 years, will now start graduate school in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Miami, where she will be working with Dr. Aaron Heller. Congratulations, Runan–we will miss you!
Lapate awarded Academic Senate grant
Dr. Lapate was awarded an Academic Senate grant for 2024-2024, which will support a new project in the lab on anticipatory anxiety, cognitive control and metacognition led by graduate student Nadu Barbashova.
Mengsi awarded UCSB Doctoral student travel award
Mengsi Li was awarded a UCSB’s Doctoral student travel award to support her travel to the 1st Timing Research Forum Summer School to be held in Chios, Greece. Congratulations, Mengsi!