Assistant Professor Sean MacEvoy's recent fMRI work sheds light on how the human visual system avoids confusion when faced with the complex environments we encounter every day. Patterns of brain activity evoked when participants viewed multiple objects simultaneously were predicted by the average of patterns evoked by each object viewed alone, ensuring that information about each object was preserved. This relationship was strong enough that researchers could "read" participant's brains to reveal which pair was being viewed at a given point in time. An article documenting these findings appeared in the June 9, 2009 issue of the journal Current Biology.
Scott Slotnick's article "Does the hippocampus mediate objective binding or subjective remembering?" will appear in NeuroImage. Previous studies have confounded context memory with "remembering" (memory with specific detail), and item memory with "knowing" (memory without specific detail). This functional MRI (fMRI) study is the first to independently test the binding hypothesis and remembering hypothesis of hippocampal function. The results only provided strong support for the binding hypothesis. These findings challenge the widely held assumption that the hippocampus is preferentially associated with subjective remembering, and highlight the role of this region in the binding of feature and context information during memory construction.
Doctoral student Katherine Mickley Steinmetz has found that valence (positive or negative) most readily affects the qualities of young and older adults’ emotional memories when those memories are low in arousal. Older adults reported remembering more subjective memories about positive low arousal images, while younger adults reported remembering more subjective memories about negative low arousal images. This finding appeared in the May 2009 issue of Memory in an article titled "Phenomenological characteristics of emotional memories in younger and older adults."
Assistant Professor Scott Slotnick's lab uses techniques in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to answer three primary questions: How detailed are memories? How are memories constructed? How does attention modulate processing?
Assistant Professor Sean MacEvoy's recent fMRI work sheds light on how the human visual system avoids confusion when faced with the complex environments we encounter every day. Patterns of brain activity evoked when participants viewed multiple objects simultaneously were predicted by the average of patterns evoked by each object viewed alone, ensuring that information about each object was preserved. This relationship was strong enough that researchers could "read" participant's brains to reveal which pair was being viewed at a given point in time. 
Scott Slotnick's article "
Doctoral student Katherine Mickley Steinmetz has found that valence (positive or negative) most readily affects the qualities of young and older adults’ emotional memories when those memories are low in arousal. Older adults reported remembering more subjective memories about positive low arousal images, while younger adults reported remembering more subjective memories about negative low arousal images. This finding appeared in the May 2009 issue of Memory in an article titled "
Assistant Professor Scott Slotnick's lab uses techniques in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to answer three primary questions: How detailed are memories? How are memories constructed? How does attention modulate processing?