Three main streams to our research:

MEMORIES ARE INTERPRETATIONS: WHAT ARE THE WAYS TO REMEMBER THE PAST?

We remember the same event differently each time it is retrieved. Why is this? This is because the hippocampus—a structure of the brain that is critical for memory—and the surrounding structures construct a mental representation of past events from various details associated with that event. Depending on how this construction happens, remembering will occur differently. Our current research aims to characterize the functional neural underpinnings of the hippocampus and associated brain structures in building memories as either zoomed-in “mental photographs” versus broader conceptual narratives. We are examining how things like stress and emotion can bias a person towards one of these forms of remembering, changing how they interpret their past.

THE PAST GUIDES OUR IMAGINATIONS AND DECISIONS: Why do we remember the past?

A key finding in memory research is that the very same processes that help us remember the past are needed for mentally time travelling to the future and creating new scenarios in our minds. This illustrates the importance of hippocampal “memory” processes to other cognitive domains. Our work pursues the exciting hypothesis that these memory processes are needed for any cognitive task that benefits from forming associative reconstructed scenarios. We are discovering how memory processes contribute to problem solving, decision-making and empathy. This line of work has implications not only for our understanding of memory, but also suggests an added consequence of memory loss.

DIFFERENCES MATTER: WHAT ARE THE EFFECTs OF AGE, SEX AND DEPRESSION ON AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY?

Remembering is a very individual process: How you remember an event is probably quite different from how your friend remembers the very same circumstance. We are committed to understanding how key factors known to target memory processing, such as aging and the presence of depression, change the way the past is viewed. We also study how these differences are reflected in the brain by identifying differences in the structures and function of the brain (specifically the hippocampus). This work is critical for detailing how memory is affected by physical age, changes with mental health, and how it is experienced distinctly by different people. Only in appreciating these differences can we understand the human experience.