A roundup of the year 2025

This year has been the most productive one for our lab so far, but of course, the groundwork for it was laid in the preceding 3 years. This semester, I had a high teaching load but also managed to make significant progress on my postdoc paper that still needs to be submitted. This is the first year, really, where we are able to share with the world some of the research we'd been working away on in the past few years. While we have published some decent conference papers already, we are beginning to submit some substantial journal papers (see the preprints below). I am confident that these will be published sometime next year. Note that most of this work was done with no funding other than institute support for students. Some of our folks are also applying to grad school, and I'm curious to see how their training and work here translate into PhD offers.

After my talk at FAIL? '25 and the institute talk I gave about my work on traveling waves (in preparation for my Wave Club talk), I received several applications from some very keen dual-degree students. In particular, this marks a change from previous years where all (most) students wanted to do was ML work in cogsci. This time, these students wanted to do neuroscience work. Coincidentally, we had also recruited two new MS by research students, both of whom will also work on core cognitive neuroscience projects, as will the PhD scholars. Once we get some EEG equipment (see the section on grants below), we should finally be able to do some neuroscience projects. While I will continue some work at the intersection of language and memory due to having very good computational linguistics students (and due to having continued interest in it myself), the lab plans to focus primarily on cognitive neuroscience work going forward. New lab recruitments signal this shift. A few computational linguistics DD students who will do ambitious projects on language and memory (we will no longer do low-hanging fruit-type studies in this domain) and a few computational natural sciences DD students who will work on computational neuroscience projects. 

Students outcomes (graduations and milestones):

1. Amal Sunny (BTech/MS dual degree, CSE; 2022-25; defended successfully on November 15, 2025).
   
2. Atharva Joshi (BTech/MS dual degree, CSE; 2022-25; defended successfully on August 14, 2025).
   
3. Prajneya Kumar (BTech/MS dual degree, computational linguistics; 2021-24; defended successfully on April 29, 2025).
4. R. Pooja (our first PhD scholar) passed her comprehensive exam in Oct 2025.

Preprints (in submission/submitted):

1. Biswas, A.*, Pamnani, V.*, Srivastava, P., & Sreekumar, V. (2025). Long-term Impact of COVID-19 on Cognition and Mental Health in an Indian Cohort. medRxiv 2025.11.17.25340384; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.17.25340384 * = equal contribution
   
2. Sunny, A., Gupta, A., & Sreekumar, V. (2025). Context Is Enough: Empirical Validation of Sequentiality on Essays. [Preprint]
   
3. Maity, A., & Sreekumar, V. (2025). Comparing Cue and Target Roles in Cued Recall Reveals Limits of Intrinsic Word Memorability. [Preprint]. Code & Data. Tweet thread.

Papers published:

1. Sunny, A., Gupta, A., Chandak, Y., & Sreekumar, V. (2025). From Stories to Statistics: Methodological Biases in LLM-Based Narrative Flow Quantification. Retrieved from osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5qpez_v1. (oral presentation, 18% acceptance rate, best paper award! $500 sponsored by Google DeepMind). Proceedings of the 29th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2025, Vienna, Austria). Tweet thread. IIITH newsletter.
2. Joshi, A., Dadi, K., & Sreekumar, V. (2025). Behavioral signatures of temporal context retrieval during continuous recognition. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21q2s8n1 Tweet thread. IIITH newsletter
3. Kumar, P.*, Khandelwal, E.*, Tapaswi, M.+, & Sreekumar, V.+ (2025). Eye vs. AI: Human Gaze and Model Attention in Video Memorability. Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 2082-2091. (oral presentation). [WACV2025] Tweet thread. *+ equal contribution

Grants:

1. Sanction of DST-CSRI—our first grant for basic neuroscience work but awaiting release so that we can purchase an EEG system
2. Release of IIT Mandi-ihub (HCI foundation) money to build cognitive games and a CBT-based sleep improvement app to be used with a smart ring's app
3. Sanction of DST-FIST for our department. While this is a departmental grant, this was high on my wishlist (and I had pushed the dept to apply in a previous year as well, but that was unsuccessful), and I put in a lot of effort into it this time (repurposed my DBT-IA grant ideas to write an aging-themed proposal) along with my colleagues. So I count it as a personal win for the lab as well since it will give all of us a high-density EEG system to play with. 

New collabs:

A really exciting one on identifying ways in which to improve spaced retrieval practice for flexible and generalizable learning, using chess as a testbed—with Prof. Vasudeva Varma and his students. We are doing a study that has been on my mind ever since my chess-obsessed days. I even roped in a grandmaster (a former trainer of mine) to help us design the opening training. 

End-of-the-year lab party

We finished the year with dinner, games, and music at our place. Looking forward to 2026 and hopefully some money in our lab account to enable some fun neuroscience work!