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Illustration of the bidirectional influence between working memory and perception
September 19, 2026

New eLife Reviewed Preprint: Working Memory Guides Perceptual Decisions Through Fast Capture and Slow Drift

We are pleased to share our new eLife Reviewed Preprint, Working Memory Guides Perceptual Decisions Through Fast Capture and Slow Drift, by Hyung-Bum Park and Weiwei Zhang. How does information held in working memory shape what we see—and how can current perception reshape what we remember? Across two experiments, participants remembered a color while completing…

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Mack (Tianye) Ma at his 2026 dissertation defense
August 13, 2026

Congratulations to Dr. Mack (Tianye) Ma!

Congratulations to Mack (Tianye) Ma on successfully defending his dissertation on August 13, 2026. We are proud to celebrate Dr. Ma and wish him continued success in his postdoctoral work at Peking University.

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Li Yang being hooded at UCR’s 2026 Graduate Division Hooding Ceremony
June 6, 2026

Celebrating Dr. Li Yang at UCR Commencement

Congratulations to Dr. Li Yang on graduating from UC Riverside with her PhD in Psychology. CONPAM Lab was delighted to celebrate this milestone with her at the 2026 Graduate Division Hooding Ceremony. We are proud of her accomplishments and wish her continued success in the next stage of her research career.

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Rishitha Kona at UCR’s 2026 Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Symposium
June 1, 2026

Celebrating undergraduate research achievements in spring 2026

Congratulations to Rishitha Kona, a CHASS runner-up at UCR’s 2026 Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Symposium for “The Relationship Between Dance Experience, Anxiety, and Visual Working Memory,” mentored by Dr. Weiwei Zhang. We also celebrated the lab’s contributions to UCR’s undergraduate research community and the Undergraduate Research Journal.

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CONPAM Lab members at the 2026 Vision Sciences Society meeting
May 19, 2026

CONPAM Lab at VSS 2026

CONPAM Lab members attended the 2026 Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida. The meeting brought together vision scientists from around the world for research presentations, discussion, and collaboration.

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CONPAM Lab presentation on hippocampal pattern separation at R’PSYC 2026
May 18, 2026

CONPAM Lab presents at R’PSYC 2026

CONPAM Lab members shared their work at R’PSYC 2026, UCR’s 8th Annual Undergraduate Psychology Research Conference. Presentations examined the capacity and precision of visual working memory for motion and the competition between working-memory precision and hippocampal pattern separation.

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CONPAM Lab presentation at UCR’s 2026 Undergraduate Research Symposium
April 24, 2026

CONPAM Lab at UCR’s 2026 Undergraduate Research Symposium

CONPAM Lab members presented research on the competition between working-memory precision and hippocampal pattern separation at UCR’s 2026 Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Symposium. We are proud of their thoughtful presentations and contributions to undergraduate research.

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Inik Kim presenting at the 2026 UCR Graduate Research Symposium
April 8, 2026

CONPAM Lab at the 2026 UCR Graduate Research Symposium

Inik Kim and Sahereh Varastegan represented CONPAM Lab at UCR’s 2026 Graduate Research Symposium on April 8. Inik presented “Dissociating Strength and Precision in Visual Working Memory Representations,” highlighting the lab’s work on how visual information is represented and maintained in working memory.

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UCR Magazine’s “Memory Matters” feature
November 14, 2024

“Memory Matters”

“Advancements in research across UCR offer new hope for Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia’ in UCR magazine!

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February 7, 2024

Congrats to Ahmed and Tammy

Tammy Dinh has been accepted into UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine! Ahmed Alghorydh has been accepted into the Ph.D. program in Neuroengineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham! WAY TO GO!

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September 1, 2023

MSRIP presentations

The two MSRIP undergraduate researchers, Ahmed Alghorydh and Gabbriele LaBranche, presented their summer research projects, at the annual  MSRIP conference.

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Zane (Weizhen) Xie joins the University of Maryland as an assistant professor
March 8, 2023

Congratulations to Zane

After receiving a NIH K99 award, Zane will be starting his tenure-track faculty position and “Integrative Cognition and Neuroscience” lab at the University of Maryland in January 2024! Congratulations!

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UCR press release about the lab’s face-memory research
March 8, 2023

UCR press release on our face memory paper

“Celebrities can be easily spotted on the street, although the internet is also flooded with celebrity lookalikes and hilarious “celebrity sightings” where strangers were mistaken as celebrities. These seemingly contradictory “celebrity sightings” phenomena widely reported on social media bring up a question; are celebrity faces remembered more precisely (and hence more recognizable) but less accurately (with biases where…

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Presentation on cognitive modeling of mammogram reading at ECR
July 20, 2022

Cognitive modeling of mammogram reading at ECR

Park & Tammy attended the annual conference of the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) in Vienna to collect data for the CRCC-funded project on cognitive modeling of mammogram reading. It is a part of the Medical Image Perception lab that Dr. Jeremy Wolfe has put together over the past few years. For this project in…

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September 2, 2021

Neurocognitive Processes for Mammographic Detection of Breast Cancer

We have been awarded a UC Cancer Research Coordinating Committee (CRCC) Faculty Pilot Grant to study “Neurocognitive Processes for Mammographic Detection of Breast Cancer”. We have assembled an integrated team of basic science researchers (Drs Zhang and Hu at UC Riverside), clinician (consultant Dr. Chen at City of Hope medical center), biostatistician and epidemiologist (consultant…

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Announcement for Lilian Azer’s APS 2021 presentation
May 13, 2021

Presentations by Lilian, Tammy, and Gaby!

Lilian and Tammy will be presenting some results regarding executive function and social behaviors from our US COVID-19 survey studies at the APS meeting and R’Psych conference (recorded video), respectively. Gaby will be presenting at the UCR undergraduate research symposium on physical effort and racial attitude (recorded video).

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July 14, 2020

A note on our PNAS paper regarding working memory & social distancing

Our recent PNAS paper reported that working memory capacity could explain unique variance in a self-report measure of social-distancing compliance and a task-based measure of fairness norm compliance during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. This observation does not diminish the impacts of various socioeconomic and psychological factors on these behaviors. In fact, in our study,…

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July 10, 2020

Working Memory Capacity Predicts Indv. Differences in Social-Distancing Compliance During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S? Check out our new paper published in PNAS!

A research project spearheaded by current NIH postdoctoral fellow and lab alumnus, Dr. Weizhen Xie, investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and social distancing compliance during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-authored by Dr. Xie, Dr. Weiwei Zhang, and lab manager Stephen Campbell, our paper titled “Working memory capacity predicts individual differences…

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July 1, 2020

June 2020

Quite an eventful month for members of the lab as the spring quarter drew to a close. We’re glad to report that one of our graduate students, Lilian Azer, successfully passed her qualifying exams with flying colors! Another bit of bright news is former RA, Richard Pham, will be matriculating to the UC Riverside School…

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May 30, 2020

May 2020

Congratulations to Vanessa Buckley, who was accepted to the Early Assurance Program for the UCR School of Medicine! Congratulations on your acceptance to Medical School! CONTINUE READING →

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February 29, 2020

February 2020

In collaboration with Kate Sweeney at UCR, Renlai Zhou at Nanjing University, and Xiaorong Chng at Central China Normal University, we are conducting an online survey to study emotion, well-being, and coping strategy in Chinese people impacted by Corona Disease 2019 (COVID-19). Stay strong, China! In further news, congratulations to RA Gabriela Macias for receiving… CONTINUE READING →

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December 1, 2019

December 2019

December has been an eventful month for the lab. We congratulate newly-minted PhD, Dr. Marcus Cappiello! Many thanks to Marcus’ dissertation committee: Drs. Seitz, Yao, and Z. We also congratulate Hyung-Bum Park for having passed his qualifying exams with flying colors! We also welcome Stephen Campbell, who has joined the lab as a full-time lab…

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October 30, 2019

October 2019

We welcome two new undergraduate student research assistants to the lab. Tammy Dinh and Manaar Syed joined our team this quarter!

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September 30, 2019

September 2019

We welcome two visiting students/scholars, Shinhae And from South Korea & Jintao Song from China! Shinhae also presented a poster on working memory consolidation at the UCR International Graduate Student Orientation.

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May 20, 2019

May 2019

We’ve got quite a bit of lab-related activity to share this month. We’ve had the opportunity to train astronauts for our research project at NASA Johnson Space Center in preparation for the upcoming NASA NEEMO mission! We also had graduate students attend and present at VSS! Three undergraduate research assistants also presented projects at the…

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April 30, 2019

April 2019

Congratulations to Lilian Azer, a second year graduate student, for passing her second year research project with flying colors! We also welcome Karen Nieto, a new undergraduate student research assistant, to the lab!

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March 30, 2019

March 2019

We welcome Li Yang from Colorado State University and SouthEast Normal University (China) who will be joining the lab as a new graduate student! We were at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual conference in San Francisco, presenting our recent work on the effects of tDCS on functional connectivity and resting-state connectivity in visual short-term…

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January 30, 2019

January 2019

Our first aging study is finally accepted for publication! Xie, W., Berry, A., Lustig,C., Deldin, P., Zhang, W. (In press). Poor Sleep Quality and Compromised Visual Working Memory Capacity. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

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October 30, 2018

October 2018

We welcome Emily Wu, Kevin Ferrer, Tiffany Le, and Connor Wu who have joined the lab as undergraduate research assistants!

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August 30, 2018

August 2018

News release on our NIMH R-1 grant at UCR Today and Science Magazine. Hyung-Bum presented a poster at the Annual Meeting of Korean Psychological Association.

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June 30, 2018

June 2018

Dr. Xie at the Graduate Division Hooding Ceremony Commencement and the department reception! Zane also received the Earle C. Anhony Travel award from UCR Graduate Council’s Fellowship Committee! Undergraduate RA JC Lynne Lu Sing also received honors at the 2018 University Honors Cording Ceremony!

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May 30, 2018

May 2018

Congratulations to Dr. Xie for successfully defending his Ph.D dissertation! We also attended and did presentations at VSS!

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March 30, 2018

March 2018

We are recruiting community participants for an ongoing fMRI study on declining memory quality in senior participants. To sign up for this study, please go to http://lifespan.ucr.edu/researchers/.

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February 28, 2018

February 2018

Congratulations to Weizhen Xie for winning “Elsevier/Vision Research Travel Award for the 2018 meeting of the Vision Science Society” for our VSS talk entitled “Decoding item-specific information in visual short-term memory from the hippocampal DG/CA3 subfield using high-resolution fMRI”. Zane also received a prestigious study abroad scholarship ($6,000) from the China Scholarship Council! We also…

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January 30, 2018

January 2018

Congratulations to lab research assistants Debora Handojo, Miriam Rizk, and Ana Martinez Flores for receiving graduate school admissions! We will miss you all!

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