McGill Psychology Department

New research from Prof. Signy Sheldon's lab shows that mentally pre-experiencing an activity makes us more likely to choose it — but the nudge is short-lived. Across three experiments, simulated activities were picked more often than unsimulated ones, yet the boost faded as the same choices recurred, and it was strongest when people vividly imagined rather than merely planned an activity. Recently published in Consciousness and Cognition.

www.sciencedirect.com

Congratulations to Professor Caroline Palmer, who has received the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) — the society's highest honour!

Prof. Palmer has profoundly shaped music cognition by establishing music performance as a model system for understanding memory, timing, movement, interpersonal synchronization, and emotional communication. Her McGill lab is renowned as a powerhouse of ideas and a generous training ground for the next generation of researchers — a career defined by both scientific rigour and deep dedication to her students.

The award joins a remarkable record of recognition, including a Tier I Canada Research Chair, the Distinguished James McGill Professorship, and Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada. Richly deserved.

2026 Lifetime Palmer | Society for Music Perception and Cognition 2026 Lifetime Achievement AwardCaroline Palmer It is an incredible honor to present to Caroline Palmer the SMPC lifetime achievement award. She is incredibly deserving of this recognition, and to be considered among the other amazing researchers in this group.This award is also personal for me, as l...

New research from Prof. Mathieu Roy's lab examines why pain avoidance becomes self-defeating in complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). On a decision-making task with brain recordings, CRPS patients learned faster from recent painful outcomes but leaned less on their own expectations to guide choices — with anxiety and reduced prefrontal activity helping explain the pattern, pointing to targets for new treatments. Recently published in the European Journal of Pain.

Mechanisms Underlying Pain Avoidance in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Background Maladaptive pain avoidance plays a critical role in chronic pain development and maintenance. Pain avoidance reinforced instrumentally through action-outcome contingencies remains poorly ...

New research from Prof. Keita Christophe's lab followed 674 Mexican-origin youth from age 10 into their mid-20s and found that identifying as "Mexican" or "Mexican American" isn't fixed: the likelihood of choosing "Mexican American" dipped in adolescence and rose again into adulthood, with birthplace and ethnic pride the strongest predictors. Recently published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Am I Mexican or Mexican American? Longitudinal Changes in Ethnic Label Use from Ages 10 to 26 - Journal of Youth and Adolescence Conversations surrounding ethnic identification are common for many minoritized individuals, and the seemingly simple act of endorsing a particular ethnic label has important implications for ethnic-racial identity, psychosocial adjustment, and wellbeing across the lifespan. While ethnic labeling is...

New research from Prof. Anna Weinberg's lab identifies distinct profiles of early-life stress and how they interact with recent stress to shape mental health in early adulthood. Recently published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.70174

Congratulations to Prof. Signy Sheldon for being awarded a grant from the Alzheimer Society Research Program for her project: Music-Based Interventions to Engage Memory in Individuals Living with Dementia

Prof. Sheldon's lab will tackle the question of how music can "unlock" old memories even in people living with dementia, testing how a song's familiarity and emotional quality support memory in real-world, everyday situations, from remembering medication to sharing stories of the past. The goal: knowledge that translates directly into better, personalized music-based programs that improve quality of life for people living with dementia.

https://braincanada.ca/funded-grants/music-based-interventions-to-engage-memory-in-individuals-living-with-dementia

From Dr. Jennifer Bartz's lab (with Drs. Sonia Krol and Signy Sheldon): the hormone oxytocin appears to color how people recall their mothers' warmth — more positively for securely attached people, more negatively for anxiously attached people. The findings support the idea that oxytocin heightens the emotional "salience" of social memories.
Emotion · https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42149556/

People with schizophrenia and people with dyslexia read differently than most — and in strikingly similar ways, according to new work from Profs. Gillian O'Driscoll and Deb Titone.
Using eye-tracking during natural story reading, their team found both groups slowed down more on rare words, showing the same word-level reading bottleneck. And in both, stronger executive function and language skills eased that bottleneck.
The takeaway: reading difficulties in these two very different conditions may share common cognitive roots — a "transdiagnostic" profile that could reshape how we understand and support struggling readers.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393226001818

We usually credit the brain's excitatory neurons with tracking rewards, while inhibitory GABAergic interneurons are treated as a supporting element. New research from Prof. Rose Bagot's lab, just published in Cell Reports, challenges that view.

Recording from GABAergic neurons in two regions that guide reward-motivated behavior—the medial prefrontal cortex and ventral hippocampus—the team found these cells actively encode reward information themselves. The signature: dips in their activity tracked the recent history of outcomes.

The twist is that behavioral state matters. When animals were exploring (rather than exploiting what they already knew), these neurons encoded outcome history much more strongly. Overall activity predicted how engaged an animal was, while predicting its actual choices drew on both regions together.

The takeaway: GABAergic interneurons aren't a passive component of reward processing—they carry information themselves, and their role shifts with what the animal is doing.

GABAergic neurons in medial prefrontal cortex and ventral hippocampus encode information about reward history in male mice During reward seeking, GABAergic interneurons in medial prefrontal cortex and ventral hippocampus encode recent reward outcomes through suppression of activity. This is independent of task requirements, with hidden Markov modeling showing that the richness of outcome-history representation is gated....

New research from Prof. David Ostry's lab shows motor memories work like verbal memories: the right cues can unlock them. After people learned a new reaching movement, a robot passively guided their arm—and that physical cue helped them reproduce what they'd learned.

The catch: it only worked when the cue closely matched the learned movement. Nudge the arm the wrong way, or cue someone who never learned the task, and nothing happened.
Motor memory has retrieval cues too—but they have to be a close match.

Cued recall of human motor memory | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society In verbal memory, retrieval cues can facilitate recall of otherwise inaccessible information. Recent work, using passive movements following a motor learning task, suggests that somatic retrieval cues similarly access motor memories. The present study aims to further describe somatic retrieval cues....