About the lab
To increase our chances of survival, we need to make decisions that benefit most from what we know and consider the specifics of the current context. Our lab investigates the emotional and cognitive mechanisms that underlie these abilities. Our aim is to illuminate how information processing in the brain results in experiencing particular feelings and having particular personal experiences come to mind.
To do this, we are investigating the mechanisms that the brain uses to encode, maintain, and retrieve memories and how it uses information to construct subjective experiences. We focus on memory mechanisms that underlie memory recall dynamics for personal experiences that people care about, for example those associated with wins and losses or strong feelings. We examine how memory-relevant cognitive abilities, such as attending to and organising information, and what we predict will happen next, influences memories and feelings.
In future, this work may enable researchers to predict from what we know about a person and their environment which one of their experiences would come to mind in a particular context, and how they would integrate what they know into a particular feeling.
In the lab, we conduct experiments, which typically involve testing healthy adult volunteers on computerised tasks. We primarily use experimental psychology methods that follow the traditional approaches of cognitive psychology. For example, to bring emotion into the lab we vary the emotional content of images a person sees, pay them money to recall a particular set of items, or ask them to endure painful stimulations of the skin. In our experiments we often take quantitative measures of self-reported emotion, attention and memory; peripheral psychophysiological measures, such as skin conductance and eye movements; and neuroimaging measures, including M/EEG and fMRI.
Our Research
