LEAP Neuro Lab RAs honored with 2026 PBS Awards

This year, four undergraduate research assistants in the LEAP Neuro Lab were honored with the 2026 Psychological & Brain Sciences Department awards!

Congratulations to Emilie Carbine, who was honored with the Morgan Award for Research Promise! This honor is awarded to the top three graduating seniors who demonstrated outstanding potential in experimental research. Emilie will be pursuing work as an Emergency Medical Technician; she hopes to attend medical school and eventually become a neurologist or psychiatrist.

Congratulations to Joy Sun, who was also honored with the Morgan Award for Research Promise! Joy is working as a full-time research assistant at Fudan University before applying to graduate school to study affective neuroscience. We look forward to seeing where she will go next!

Congratulations to Harleen Dhanda, who was honored with the Service to Students award! This honor is awarded to a graduating senior who exhibited outstanding service to their peers. Harleen will be continuing her work as a research assistant in our lab while pursuing a Master’s in Social Work, and she intends to eventually pursue a PhD in Affective Science; we are excited to keep working with her!

Congratulations to Katherine Retzer, who was awarded Distinction in the Major! This honor is awarded to graduating seniors who complete an honors thesis with distinction. Katherine’s thesis, titled “The link between Online Temporal Perception, Temporal Memory, and Dispositional Negativity in a dynamic emotion state”, was completed in the LEAP Neuro Lab under the direct supervision of Dr. Jingyi Wang. Katherine will be starting as a Research Specialist position in the Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab (PI: Edward G. Freedman) at the University of Rochester. We look forward to watching her future as a scientist unfold!

Last but not least, congratulations to Megan Pau, who was honored with the Morgan Award for Academic Excellence! This honor is awarded to the top graduating seniors in Psychological & Brain Sciences to recognize their exceptional scholarship. In addition to assisting Mengsi Li with her fMRI-TMS study on emotional sequence learning, Megan graduated with a 4.0 GPA! She intends to pursue medical school, aiming to eventually specialize in Psychiatry.

We are incredibly proud of all of our graduating senior research assistants, and we look forward to seeing where they all go next!

Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) study published in PNAS

Work from a collaborative study between the LEAP Neuro Lab and Action Lab West (PI: Dr. Scott Grafton), titled “Incentive valence differentially engages open-and closed-loop basal ganglia circuits during movement initiation”, was just published in PNAS! Authored by Dr. Neil Dundon, this study combined 7T resting-state fMRI with 3T task-based fMRI to detail how motivationally relevant contexts influence movement initiation through distinct basal ganglia circuits, providing a new systems-level account of how affective salience and valence shape voluntary action. Specifically, the work identifies a ventral putamen-centered "open-loop circuit" that links affective and motor regions, operating alongside the canonical dorsal putamen-centered closed-loop sensorimotor circuit. This work helps explain how affective contexts can modulate voluntary movement and offers a candidate mechanism for phenomena such as paradoxical kinesia in Parkinson’s disease, where motivationally salient contexts may bypass degraded sensorimotor circuits. Congratulations Neil and team!

Incentive valence differentially engages open-and closed-loop basal ganglia circuits during movement initiation

Joanne recognized as Open Science Champion by ASAP Collaborative Research Network

Joanne Stasiak was recognized by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s initiative’s Collaborative Research Network as an Open Science Champion for the month of April. The organization celebrated her open science practices in publishing her recent paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, including sharing all fMRI data on OpenNeuro, adhering to data formatting standards, and publishing all task and analysis scripts on Github and Zenodo. Congratulations Joanne!

Joanne’s threat anticipation study published in JoCN

Joanne Stasiak’s paper, “Integrated representations of threat and controllability in lateral frontal pole”, was recently published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience! Here, Joanne used finite impulse response modeling and pattern similarity analysis to examine dynamic engagement and representational properties of distinct LPFC regions during a naturalistic threat-of-shock paradigm. While caudal and mid-LPFC maintained independent representations of the unpleasantness and controllability of an upcoming electric shock, these orthogonal features were integrated within FPl to form conjunctive representations of threat and action-control information – which were in turn associated with successful motor performance. Together, this work furthers our understanding of the functional organization of the LPFC and highlights a key role for FPl in flexibly representing goal-relevant emotional information for anticipated future challenges. Congratulations Joanne!

Integrated representations of threat and controllability in lateral frontal pole

Lapate gives talk at SANS

 

Dr. Lapate presented a faculty blitz talk titled “Emotion sculpts time in memory: Evidence from a dense-sampling study of real-life emotional events” at the annual meeting of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society held in San Diego, CA.

 

LEAP Neuro lab presents at SANS

 

At the annual Social and Affective Neuroscience Society meeting in San Diego, CA, Mengsi Li and Sydney Fortner presented a poster titled “The bidirectional interplay between emotion and temporal memory: Evidence from a dense-sampling study of real-life emotional events.”

 

Recent preprints from the LEAP Neuro lab

The LEAP Neuro Lab has been busy wrapping up some of our recent work, with three manuscripts being released as preprints and submitted for review!

Joanne Stasiak’s work, titled “Neural control of autonomic arousal during threat anticipation revealed by high-resolution cardiac contractility”, used trans-radial electrical bioimpedance velocimetry (TREV) – a novel, non-invasive measure of cardiac contractility – to examine neural-cardiac coupling during the anticipation of threat using a threat-of-shock paradigm in the MRI scanner. Joanne found that threat-related increases in TREV-indexed contractility were associated with threat-modulated activation in posterior parietal cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and cerebellum, which were in turn linked to adaptive motor responses during controllable threat. Of note, these modulatory effects were specific to threat-dependent changes in TREV-indexed cardiac contractility and were not observed when examining changes in skin conductance. Moreover, Joanne found that trial-wise changes in TREV more closely tracked changes in subjective arousal (compared to changes in skin conductance) – further validating and establishing this new MRI-compatible method as an excellent tool to non-invasively track continuous changes in sympathetic arousal.

Neural control of autonomic arousal during threat anticipation revealed by high-resolution cardiac contractility

Dr. Jingyi Wang’s paper, “Distinct amygdalar pathways to frontopolar cortex and medial temporal lobe support temporal memory for emotional events”, sought to elucidate the role of lateral frontal pole (FPl) and medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions in temporal memory for emotional events using trial unique positive and negative images encoded in the MRI scanner, followed by a surprise temporal memory task. Jingyi replicated previous findings suggesting that higher pattern similarity in FPl and hippocampus are associated with poorer temporal memory for 'when' an emotional image was presented during the experiment. Negative emotional valence was associated with stronger amygdala activation. Critically, Jingyi found that higher trial-wise amygdala activation predicted higher between-trial pattern similarity in hippocampus, but lower within-trial pattern similarity in FPl. Collectively, these findings provide evidence for distinct amygdala-PFC and amygdala-MTL relationships subserving temporal memory for emotional events.

Distinct amygdalar pathways to frontopolar cortex and medial temporal lobe support temporal memory for emotional events

Recent work by Mengsi Li has also been released as a preprint, titled “The temporal organization of memory and emotion is reciprocally coupled”. Here, Mengsi combined EEG and behavioral measures to investigate how affective spillover (i.e., the persistence of affect over time) is regulated by the temporal organization of memory. We found that alpha burst time modulated affective spillover and was predictive of dilated remembered temporal distances. In addition, longer remembered temporal distance between emotional images in sequences predicted reduced affective spillover, while higher within-event temporal order memory was associated with greater affective spillover. Changes in emotional valence across sequences were associated with longer temporal distance estimates, and higher temporal order memory. These results suggest a reciprocal relationship between the temporal dynamics of emotion and the temporal structure of memory, unveiling how memory structure shapes – and is shaped by – emotion. Stay tuned for more!

The temporal organization of memory and emotion is reciprocally coupled

Lapate and Wang delivered talks at two CNS symposia

 

Dr. Lapate gave an invited talk titled “How Emotion Bends Time in Memory: Behavioral and Neural Evidence from Real-Life Emotional Events” in the symposium “Emotion and the organization of temporal context in memory” alongside speakers Daniela Palombo, Andy Lee, and chairman Joseph Dunsmoor at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Dr. Jingyi Wang’s presentation, “The intrinsic time tracker: Temporal context is embedded in entorhinal and hippocampal functional connectivity patterns,” was delivered as part of the “Neural Time Machine: Temporal Organization of Experience in the Brain” symposium alongside speakers James Antony, Benjamin Kanter, and chairman Jie Zheng.

 

LEAP Neuro Lab to present in two upcoming symposia at CNS

We are thrilled to announce that two symposia featuring some our lab’s latest research have been selected for presentation at the upcoming annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) to be held in March 7-10 in Vancouver, BC.

Dr. Lapate will be present a talk titled: “How Emotion Bends Time in Memory: Behavioral and Neural Evidence from Real-Life Emotional Events” as part of a symposium titled Emotion and the organization of temporal context in memory chaired by Dr. Joey Dunsmoor.

Dr. Jingyi Wang will be present: “The intrinsic time tracker: Temporal context is embedded in entorhinal and hippocampal functional connectivity patterns” as part of the Neural Time Machine: Temporal Organization of Experience in the Brain symposium chaired by Dr. Jie Zheng.

We hope to see you there!

Lapate gives talk at SfN

 

Dr. Lapate gave an invited talk titled “Memory for time and emotion: Reciprocal interactions and neural mechanisms” in the minisymposium “Representation of Time in the Brain” alongside speakers Virginie van Wassenhove, John J. Sakon, Gui Xue, Jie Zheng, and chairman Sze Chai Kwok at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, CA.

The speakers have also co-authored a new review in the Journal of Neuroscience titled “Neural Representation of Episodic Time.”

Neural Representation of Episodic Time
 

LEAP Neuro lab presents at SfN

Jingyi’s intrinsic temporal context study published in Nature Communications

 

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!

 

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!

 

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:

Emotional state dynamics impacts temporal memory

And the thoughtful introduction to this special issue (with a cool drawing of Jingyi’s findings) by Drs. Palombo and Talmi here:

Emotional time travel: the role of emotion in temporal memory