My research group investigates episodic memory and its implementation in the human brain. Our goal is to develop a biological and computational understanding of how the brain stores, accesses, and transforms information from past experiences, with an emphasis on how these processes support adaptive behavior. Current projects in the lab revolve around several themes:

Interactions between memories: Memories do not exist in isolation. For every new memory we make, there are countless related memories are already stored in the brain, 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 separated and sometimes become integrated together? We test theories that explain how memory traces are shaped by one another and investigate how these changes influence subsequent behavior.

Visual memory: As primates, our brains have evolved a considerable amount of circuitry to compress and transform the overwhelming flow 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? We investigate 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 study how the content and format of memory are shaped by environmental context and task demands, and how this plasticity enables efficient perception, learning, and decision-making.