Healthy cognitive aging

Our cognitive abilities tend to change as we get older, even for people who do not develop an age-related neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s Disease. In our lab, we try to understand the types of cognitive changes that are part of normal aging. We focus on what aspects of memory decline in older age and which are preserved. 

Related publications

• Learning new categories in older age: a review of theoretical perspectives and empirical findings (2023). ​Psychology and Aging.
• The effects of age on prototype- and exemplar-based categorization (2022). Psychology and Aging.
• Age effects on category learning, categorical perception, and generalization (2022). Memory.

The Neuroscience of Memory

​The ability to remember past experiences is a critical brain function. It is key to our sense of self and helps us develop expectations about what will happen in the future. In our lab, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity while people learn and remember information. We then use analytical tools like computational modelling, functional connectivity analyses, and multivariate pattern analyses to better understand how the brain forms, stores, and retrieves memories.

Related publications

• Tracking prototype and exemplar representations in the brain across learning (2020). eLife.
• Generalization and the hippocampus: More than one story? (2020). Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.
• Differential functional connectivity along the long axis of the hippocampus aligns with differential roles in memory specificity and generalization (2019). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Building new knowledge

Memory allows us to remember specific events, but we can also make connections across separate experiences to derive new knowledge. For example, you might see two different people walking the same dog on separate mornings and infer that the two people have some relationship. In our lab, we study how our brains store memories to allow us to both remember a specific event and generalize across different experiences.

Related publications

• Coherent category training enhances generalization in prototype-based categories (2023). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition.
• Generalization and false memory in an acquired equivalence paradigm: the influence of physical resemblance across related episodes (2021). Frontiers in Psychology.
• Training set coherence and set size effects on concept generalization and recognition (2020). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition.