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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.”
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!
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 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!!
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 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!
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!
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 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!!
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:
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:
