Research Questions
Why do we remember some things and forget others, especially as we age?
We study the real-world factors influencing how we encode and retrieve episodic memories. By leveraging immersive virtual reality, behavioral experiments and neuroimaging, we bridge the gap between episodic memories in our daily life and the underlying neural mechanisms. We recreate complex naturalistic environments to see how memory works in action. We map these cognitive processes to neural mechanisms using eye-tracking, high-resolution neuroimaging, and plasma biomarkers to uncover the contributors to episodic memory variability across the lifespan.
The “what” and “where” of episodic memory
In everyday life, we encounter a continuous stream of experiences naturally change over time and space. Moving through our life brings changes in both spatial context and time, which appear to organize and drive the encoding of episodic memories Using tools like immersive virtual reality and desktop virtual reality, we can ask questions like how does the physical space that we move through impact encoding, retrieval and the interplay between episodic memories.
A second line of work in this space investigates how representations of space and context may change in aging and disease using neuroimaging techniques (high resolution functional and structural neuroimaging).
Cognitive and biological variables of memory variability
In our day-to-day lives, the ability to learn and remember information is suspectable to numerous influences, including cognitive functions that may underlay memory performance (e.g., attention, cognitive reserve, cognitive flexibility), as well as psychophysiological and ecological variables (e.g., stress, distractors within the environment, long-term social media usage).
To examine contributors of variability in episodic performance, we can broadly examine the interplay between these different cognitive variables and how the presence of these variables may impact memory.
In aging and Alzheimer’s disease, modulators of learning and memory performance include the presence of Alzheimer’s disease pathology and well as AD-independent neural changes (e.g., frontal lobe cortical thickness, white matter hyperintensities). To examine memory variability across the lifespan, we use a combination of biofluid biomarkers (e.g., plasma), structural measures (e.g., cortical thickness, DTI), as well as functional measures (e.g., functional neuroimaging).
Functional and structual changes underlying memory decline in aging and Alzheimer’s disease
