How does the human mind innovate and create using past and present knowledge?  What enhances--or impairs--our ability to optimally take advantage of our acquired experience and learning?  My research and intellectual interests address these questions and aim to build new bridges from human memory to thinking.  Using the diverse and convergent methodologies of cognitive neuroscience, my goal is to understand the benefits and hazards of memory so as to enable us to think more effectively and adaptively.

Methods

Human beings often show surprisingly large fluctuations in how readily and accurately they can “retrieve” what they know.  Such fluctuations influence how flexibly we can use knowledge to inform our judgments, decisions, and actions.  My research focuses on factors that affect how we gain access to, or awareness of, what we know and remember, and the accuracy and confidence associated with such access.  Research is conducted with young adults, older adults, and neuropsychological populations with memory deficits (e.g., individuals with global amnesia) to explore cognitive and neuropsychological factors that affect the accuracy and ease with which we retrieve and use previously acquired information.  Other work uses neuroimaging techniques (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to examine the neuroanatomical correlates of memory encoding and retrieval in healthy young adults in relation to such factors as recent exposure to a word or object (priming), or the type of judgment that was required during the initial versus subsequent encounter with a stimulus. 

One current focus of research concerns the specificity of the representations that support memory and judgment.  We can remember events with differing levels of detail, recalling information in a highly specific and detailed manner, or in a more general, meaning-based, conceptual, or “gist-like” manner.  Under what conditions do we rely on each of these types of information?  Do individuals with memory deficits such as healthy older adults or global amnesics rely more on one or the other of these types of information, or are both forms equally impaired?

Most recently, I have been exploring how the specificity with which we consider information itself sets a context for our later judgments and decisions.  Both particularity and abstraction are essential to human thought but adaptive movement between them is powerfully constrained by cognitive processes. 

Another, more recent, focus is on the level of confidence associated with decisions that we make in various domains, such as perceptual and memory judgments, and complex classifications.  What types of information support feelings of confidence?  What are the neuroanatomical correlates of the assessment of, and experience of, feelings of confidence?  How is the ability to appropriately align confidence with actual performance in cognitive and more complex judgments affected by various situational and task demands?  Does the alignment of one's confidence level with one's actual performance get better––or worse––as we get older?