Alison Preston and Lab

Welcome back, Longhorns! Classes start today at The University of Texas at Austin, and the Preston Lab is back to a full house.

Our undergraduate research assistants are back on the schedule, studies are up and running, and we're looking forward to another year of learning how memory and reasoning develop from childhood into adulthood.

If you're an Austin-area family curious about taking part in our research, we'd love to hear from you at [email protected].

Today we're highlighting our amazing Research Associate Nicole Varga. She studies what happens in the brain when two experiences overlap. When a child learns two related things, the brain can choose to link those memories together into one connected memory, or hold them apart as separate events. Nicole's research looks at how the brain makes that decision, and why children and adults do it differently.

What she's found is that children tend to keep overlapping memories separate, and adults are more likely to link them together. Both approaches have their benefits. Keeping memories distinct helps children remember each event accurately, but it also makes it harder for them to connect what they've learned and come up with something new.

Her current work asks what causes that difference in the first place. In the future, Nicole would love to study memory using the kinds of materials children actually encounter in a classroom so we can better understand how all of this supports the learning that happens every day.

We're so lucky to have her. Good luck tomorrow, Nicole! 🧡

Today is Sara's last day in the lab, and we're so grateful for everything she's done for us!

Sara took our lab administration to a whole new level. She built the systems that kept us organized and running smoothly, and she's the reason our five-year study following teens' brain development got off the ground. She set up our recruitment and scheduling from scratch, wrote the protocols for our behavioral and neuroimaging sessions, and trained and coordinated a whole team of grad and undergrad researchers. Through all of it, she cared so much about getting things right and making every family feel welcome. Her behind-the-scenes work gave our trainees and me way more time to focus on the science.

We're going to miss Sara so much, as a colleague and as part of our lab family. She's off to an exciting new chapter in project management with our local government, and we know she's going to be great at it.

Thank you for everything you built here, Sara. Congratulations, and good luck! 🧡

We'll be at the UMLAUF Sculpture Garden + Museum's Family Day this Sunday, 07/12!

Stop by the Preston Lab table to explore hands-on science activities and chat with our team about the exciting work happening in the lab. Whether you're a curious kid, a budding scientist, or just love learning something new, we'd love to meet you!

Join us for a fun day of art, nature, and STEAM with an amazing lineup of community partners.

📍 UMLAUF Sculpture Garden + Museum
📅 Sunday, July 12
⏰ 11:00 AM–4:00 PM

See you there!

Celebrating two milestones in the Preston Lab this week! 🎉

Andrei Amatuni successfully defended his dissertation proposal! His research looks at how we learn the hidden patterns in our experiences and use them to figure out new situations, and how that ability grows as we move from childhood into adulthood. Congratulations, Andrei!

We're also saying goodbye to Dr. Owen Friend, who is joining JP Morgan Chase as an Applied AI/ML Associate. He'll take what he's learned about how people learn and remember and use it to study how we interact with AI tools. Congratulations, Owen, and thank you for everything. (We got so caught up in Pictionary at his goodbye party that we nearly forgot to grab a photo until the very end of the night!)

As this school year comes to a close, we want to give a huge thank you to our incredible Research Assistants for all their hard work, dedication, and support throughout the year. From assisting with data collection and participant visits to helping keep our studies running smoothly behind the scenes, your contributions are invaluable.

The research we do wouldn't be possible without your time, effort, and enthusiasm, and we're so grateful to have such an amazing team. Thank you for everything you’ve done this year — we can’t wait to see all that you accomplish next! 🧠🧡

We are excited to welcome Emily Powell as the newest research coordinator in the Preston Lab!

In the Preston Lab, Emily will play a central role in our NIH-funded longitudinal BrainWave Project, which examines how memory representations change through adolescence and how those changes shape the ways individuals make decisions, reason, and learn about the world.

We are especially excited to support Emily as she expands her research interests into developmental cognitive neuroscience and prepares for future graduate training. Her curiosity, organization, and collaborative spirit will be a wonderful addition to the lab.

Welcome to the lab, Emily — we are so glad to have you join us!

Our kids get better at reasoning from memory as they grow up. But is it the same brain process getting stronger, or is something more fundamental changing in the brain?

In a new paper from our lab, we used brain imaging (fMRI) and computational modeling to test that question directly.

We scanned children (7–12) and adults in an fMRI while they completed a memory-based inference task, then modeled their response times to identify which strategy their brains were using to complete the task successfully.

Across both age groups, we found that the hippocampus guided inference decisions, stitching together separate memories to reach the correct answer.

In adults, a different brain region called the angular gyrus supported a faster, more direct route to the correct answer by organizing memories according to their relational structure rather than their episodic details. As a result, adults were able to make the inference directly rather than by stitching it together from separate memories.

Overall, we show that children and adults can both reason successfully from memory, but they do so using fundamentally different computations. So development into adulthood isn’t just the brain getting better at doing things; it’s reorganizing how knowledge is represented and used to guide decisions.

These findings reframe learning itself, because building structured knowledge may be what leads to more efficient reasoning, not just stronger memories.

Our findings have direct implications for academic success because the ability to generalize and draw connections across learning experiences is critical. It turns out that how knowledge is structured may matter more than how much is learned.

Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.21.719709

Come find us this Sunday at the Thinkery's Spring into STEAM event!

Stop by the Preston Lab table to learn about our research, try a hands-on brain challenge, and hear what it's like to work in a neuroscience lab.

Learn more here:

STEAM Sunday - Thinkery Discover the power of STEAM through play at Thinkery’s seasonal STEAM Sundays! Families can dive into hands-on activities, themed story times, and expert-led pop-ups that celebrate Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math—all included with General Admission.

The Preston Lab is representing at the 2026 Girls in STEM Conference hosted by Girlstart this weekend!

Molly Pierce and Amina Shmanova will be speaking to 4th-8th grade girls from the Austin area about their personal journeys in STEM, what inspired them to pursue science, and what it’s like working and training in research today.

We’re so proud to support events that empower and inspire the next generation of scientists!

Learn more about Girlstart and the Girls in STEM Conference: https://girlstart.org/our-programs/girls-in-stem-conference/