Dr. Lapate will be presenting new data demonstrating that the frontopolar cortex integrates temporally accumulated emotional information to support context-sensitive action selection in mid-LPFC, revealing a rostro–caudal functional gradient in LPFC for time-emotion integration. This work was led by Mengsi Li and will be presented at Control Processes in Ghent, Belgium (June 8–10). Stay tuned!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.”
LEAP Neuro lab presents at SfN
At the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, CA, Sydney Fortner presented “Evidence of temporal tracking at multiple timescales along the hippocampal longitudinal axis,” Jingyi Wang presented “Lateral frontal pole autocorrelation tracks temporal memory fidelity in emotional contexts”, and Joanne Stasiak presented “High-resolution cardiac contractility tracks subjective emotion and the neural correlates of sympathetic arousal”. Congratulations all!
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!
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:
