We have an NSF grant to study cooperation and competition in memory-guided attention, and we are looking to recruit a post-doc!
See this ad for more details and apply!

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Welcome to new lab members Emily Meschke, Jonah Ismael, Sally Ismael, and Elisa Hu!
Read more about them on our People page.

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What factors are more vs. less important in predicting what we remember?

Congrats to Chey for their new preprint, which systematically investigates how image memorability, evoked emotion, and consolidation delay influence memory! Chey found that image memorability was the strongest predictor of memory, and memorability interacted with image-evoked arousal. Check out the preprint on our Publications page!

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Attention can be directed externally to the world or internally to our thoughts and memories, in a way that is either aligned or misaligned with current goals.
How are these attentional states balanced?

In a collaborative review paper led by Sam Verschooren, we describe how the mind and brain transition between these attentional states, and how neuromodulatory systems play a role in transitions along the dimensions of external/internal and on- vs. off-task states.
Check out the paper on our Publications page! 

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How do we update our predictions when the environment changes?

Congratulations to Hannah for her new paper (in press at Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B!) showing that the hippocampus rapidly integrates representations of previously distinct environments when they become connected. This integration supports behavioral anticipation of upcoming events. Find the preprint on our Publications page!

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How does external attention (to the world) interact with internal attention (to our thoughts)?

In a collaborative review paper with Sam Verschooren and Tobias Egner, we propose that internal and external attention can be competitive, unfold concurrently, or cooperate. We highlight the situations in which these types of relationships might occur. The preprint is on our Publications page!

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How do the brain's event representations change with experience?

Congratulations to Narjes on her new paper (in Journal of Neuroscience)! She showed that the brain's event representations are not fixed – event timescales change with experience! Slow-timescale event structure predicted memory recall. Find the paper on our Publications page!

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How can we disentangle lower-level and higher-level visual features?

Congratulations to Zall for creating ​a novel image set that factorially crosses scene-object and texture-pattern pairings to partially decouple low- and high-level visual features! Check out the preprint on our Publications page, browse the image set, and feel free to use it in your research!​​

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How do we balance encoding the present and predicting the future?

Check out an intriguing paper by Craig, Hannah, Raheema, and Edoardo! Across three studies, they show that when we successfully predict the future, we are more likely to remember the present. The paper is published in Open Mind and is available on our Publications page!

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How do we resolve competition between similar memories to behave adaptively?

 

Congratulations to Serra for her extensively updated preprint, which thoroughly demonstrates that hippocampal differentiation of competing memories reduces competition in visual cortex during memory-guided attention. Check it out on our Publications page!​

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