About Us

Synopsis

Most of our work focuses on short-term memory, a.k.a. "working" memory, broadly defined as a general-purpose mental workspace that allows you to remember and manipulate information. Ever repeat a phone number to yourself until you could write it down or mentally add a pair of three-digit numbers? Those are two classic forms of working memory. 

Who cares?

Working memory has two limits: the amount of stuff you can store, and how long you can store it for. We can measure these limits in different people, and it turns out that they're strong predictors of scores on tests of general cognitive ability like IQ and SAT scores. Moreover, storage capacity and duration are disrupted in many developmental, learning, psychiatric, and neurological conditions that manifest at different times across the lifespan, and these disruptions tend to persist even when "classic" symptoms associated with these conditions are controlled through therapeutic interventions. This, in turn, can have a major impact on patients' educational attainment and overall quality-of-life. For example, it's hard to complete a list of complex tasks at work if you can only remember that list for a few seconds. 

Ok, so what do you do?

Memory systems are only useful if you can access information in those systems to make decisions and plan actions. Thus, we're interested in the nexus between memory and motor planning. For example, how do you get from an abstract memory representation to a choice like "go to restaurant A instead of B", or "press button 1 or button 2"?

This seems like an incredibly simple question, but we haven't been able to solve it ... yet. So, our lab studies the psychology and neurobiology of these memory-to-action transformations. Most of our work uses combinations of behavioral testing and non-invasive measurements of human brain activity like EEG and fMRI, but we also dabble in mathematical modeling (e.g., if you were going to build a brain to solve a problem, what would the architecture look like?), and brain stimulation techniques like TMS and tDCS.