Research Overview

The ability to store, access, and manipulate information from the past is fundamental to human cognition and behavior. Our scientific objective is to develop a biological and computational understanding of how the human brain achieves these tasks in a way that optimizes adaptive behavior. Our approach borrows insights from cognitive psychology, vision science, and neuroscience and makes use of multiple tools, including episodic memory tasks, eye-tracking, computational modeling, and human brain measurements. The lab’s current research projects revolve around several themes:

Interactions between memories

Our memories don’t exist in isolation. For every memory we make, there are countless related memories already stored in our brains, and countless more that we may experience in the future. What are the rules that govern interactions between memories? Why do similar memories sometimes remain separable from each other and sometimes become integrated together? In the lab, we’re interested in testing theories that explain how memory traces are shaped by one another and in understanding how these changes influence later behavior.

Visual memory

As primates, our brains have evolved a considerable amount of circuitry to compress and transform the overwhelming amount of visual information that enters our nervous system moment-to-moment. How do our memory structures interface with incoming visual information and further transform it? How are neural representations during memory retrieval different than during perception, and how is this related to the architecture of the brain? In the lab, we seek to understand the bidirectional interactions between our memory and visual systems and how they support behavior.

Adaptive memory-guided behavior

Human memory has enormous capacity and yet details for our everyday lives are frequently forgotten or distorted. How might this lack of fidelity promote adaptive behavior across the wide variety of circumstances we may encounter in the future? We’re interested in understanding how the content and format of our memories are shaped by the environment and task demands and in how this plasticity supports ongoing perception, learning, and decision-making.