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:
