Zach Reagh
Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis • memory, cognitive aging, & neuroimaging • pronounced like “ray” • send doughnuts • he/him
- Reposted by Zach ReaghExplain to Congress how important it is to keep multiyear funding of NIH grants in the funding bill. This protects against Russell Vought's trick, which is to make this year's NIH budget cover multiple years of research in advance. Tell your Congresscritter. US Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121.
- My lab is recruiting a postdoc and a full-time research technician to work on an NIH-funded project studying age-related changes in memory for naturalistic events. Behavior, fMRI, and blood-based biomarkers. 3+ years funding guaranteed. Postdoc: tinyurl.com/ykjfbnj8 Tech: tinyurl.com/2f2hw3f5
- Prohibiting academics and researchers from associating with, in some cases, the premier organizations in their field is counter to the core mission of a university. This *needs* to see resounding pushback. Otherwise, what are we even doing here? fabbs.org/news/2026/01...
- Validity of the observation notwithstanding, it is incredibly frustrating to see the current moment assessed in terms of branding. People could lose their access to healthcare and food. That’s a lot more important than your “brand.”
- Chris Murphy: "There will be pretty substantial damage to a Dem brand that has been rehabilitated if on the heels of an election in which the people told us to keep fighting, we immediately stop... if we surrender without having gotten anything, I worry it'll be hard to get them back up off the mat"
- The Toronto Blue Jays have the opportunity to do the funniest thing to the United States in 2025, and I am 100% here for it.
- I would obviously prefer a resounding “no” in favor of sticking to our principles, but I suppose it is worth acknowledging that a university such as ours - located in a place subject to deeply conservative politics - is not in the easiest position one could imagine. In the end, I’ll take it.
- Traveling from the US to Canada for a conference next week, and Air Canada just emailed me warning me how risky it is to be in the United States right now 🫡
- Reposted by Zach ReaghIf you're interested in the cognitive neuroscience of memory feel free to email me! I do experimental psychology, brain imaging (fMRI and MEG) and a bit of modelling. Lab is doing stuff on forgetting, aging, schemas, and event boundaries, but we're not limited to that. #psychscisky #neuroskyence
- It's that time of year when many start thinking about applying for PhDs. If you're applying for a UK PhD position, here is a blog post I wrote a while back that might be helpful #cognition #psychscisky #neuroskyence #psychjobs
- Should I start telling students to get degrees in AI instead of cognitive neuroscience? Asking for a field.
- Reposted by Zach Reagh🌟 Excited to share that I'm recruiting PhD students in Psychology for my new lab at Rice University this cycle (Signal boost appreciated!) To learn more, check out the Learning & Behavior Change Lab website: www.sinclairlab-rice.com Applications are due Dec 1st: psychology.rice.edu/graduate/pro...
- Another new-ish paper: Events in the stream of behavior Maverick Smith, @jzacks.bsky.social, and I discuss how the brain (esp. the Default Mode Network) represents event models, leveraging different information domains and scales of information processing. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Next up, from @atabk.bsky.social and @wouterkool.bsky.social: Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure. In sum, Ata stuck hidden (and shifting) rules into a word list learning task, creating "events" that influenced the structure of recall. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
- I'm a behind on shouting out new papers! From Angelique Delarazan: Narrative Coherence Warps the Timeline of Recalled Naturalistic Events. In sum, when recalling stories, people systematically deviate from temporal organization to follow the narrative threads. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
- Check out a new preprint from Adi, postdoc working with me and Jeff Zacks. I’m *extremely* excited to finally, officially get this out into the world 🙂
- 1/ 🚨 Preprint alert! How does the brain make sense of continuous experience? We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall. 👉 doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.…
- I just got NOAs on an NSF grant and an R01 in the same week, and I cannot begin to put into words the bizarre combination of relief, exhaustion, elation, and survivor’s guilt I am currently feeling.
- What a fun and surreal day. Huge congrats to @atabk.bsky.social for defending his dissertation. I couldn’t be more proud ❤️
- I’m just sitting here looking at the list of grant applications I had planned to work on this summer, and struggling to avoid the conclusion that it will be a huge waste of time.
- You might have seen this pup in some of my papers and presentations. This is Maddie, and she was my best friend in the whole world. We had 16 wonderful years together. This past week has been incredibly hard, but it’s helped me refocus on what really matters amidst all the chaos in the world.
- Much needed physical punishment and mental replenishment. Druid Arch in Canyonlands National Park.
- My lab is full of deeply unserious people, and I love them
- Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!
- This study examines how events structured recall, which was impaired for items after event boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showed that decision certainty predicts recall success. @atabk.bsky.social @wouterkool.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...
- Awful things were happening *before* wealthy people started losing money today.
- This is SUCH a cool study. Know that one effect event boundaries have on temporal order memory? The impairment they cause? Turns out that effect depends on the “events” being arbitrary. Things look very different when you test order memory for meaningfully-associated events.
- Hey friends! Come say hi to folks from my lab and from @jzacks.bsky.social lab at #CNS2025. We have a bunch of in-progress stuff this time, including a “sketchpad series” by @raynatang.bsky.social. Also, Veronica and June (with @alexbarnett.bsky.social) were undergrads when they did their projects 🙂
- Reposted by Zach ReaghSave the date! If you're going to CNS, stop by my poster on Sunday evening to get the whole story about what hippocampal timescales can tell us about memory and aging! Poster C42 #CNS2025
- Two months into the new US presidency, I’m struck by how quickly we collectively acquiesced to being told what was acceptable for universities to do and to study. Instant acceptance of thought policing from a culture that will tell anyone who listens (and those who would rather not) how free we are.
- Apropos of nothing, do y’all remember when a not-perfectly-secure email server practically ended Hillary Clinton’s career? Yep, apropos of nothing at all. Ha.
- Maddie is well-liked enough in the lab that @atabk.bsky.social fights through his pet dander allergy to pay tribute 🙂
- The lab party took a turn for the silly
- Standing up for science with @jzacks.bsky.social at the Missouri State Capitol
- My best bud of nearly 16 years landed a cancer diagnosis. She’s still happy and okay for the moment, but it’s tough to know the clock’s ticking. I’m thankful she’s had such a full life, and I owe her so much (as I said in the dedications page of my dissertation). Maddie, you’re the very best person.
- About to go give feedback to grad students and postdocs on their proposals in an NIH grant writing course, and let’s just say I have complicated feelings about that right now.
- Apropos of nothing, today I realized that my love of African coffees Trojan Horsed me into a growing affinity for tea.
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- I don’t meant to imply any sweeping generalizations here, but I think we’re going to have to reckon with educational decline.
- It feels odd sharing a positive story right now, but I figure that’s energy worth putting into the world. I’m about 3 weeks out of surgery to treat carpal tunnel issues. I suddenly realized my fingers didn’t feel numb at any point today, for the first time in well over a year. I cried happy tears.
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- Endorse 👇 We can be apathetic at times. We can *afford* to be apathetic at times. This is not one of those times. Scientists have not done the best job of communicating the value of our everyday work to people. We must urgently change that. Research in the United States depends on it.
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