Research Interests

What does it feel like to have a memory?

Our research investigates the cognitive and brain mechanisms of human memory, focusing particularly on the subjective experience of remembering and how we use mental experiences to make sense of the world.

This work involves inter-relating cognitive hypotheses with evidence from functional neuroimaging of healthy volunteers and from examining the effects of neurological and psychiatric disorders, and normal aging, on memory abilities.

We then work to realise the impact of our research by translating the findings into training interventions that can help older adults and others to apply effective encoding and retrieval strategies in everyday life to enhance independence and wellbeing.

Research in the laboratory uses a number of methods, including behavioural measures, computational modelling, functional and structural neuroimaging (fMRI/sMRI), electrophysiology (EEG/MEG), and brain stimulation (TMS/tDCS).

Angular gyrus is involved in integrating multimodal memory features

Scientists have made great progress understanding how people learn and recall word lists, for example, but have only recently begun to illuminate the subjective experience of remembering - the vivid, multisensory, first-person feeling of mentally re-living past events. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, and interdisciplinary perspectives, we study how the hippocampus binds and reactivates event features, how parietal regions such as the angular gyrus integrate these features into rich, egocentric recollective scenes, and how prefrontal mechanisms support reflective judgments about our memories. By combining behavioural measures, neuroimaging, and innovative methods for sampling experience, we aim to explain what it feels like to remember, why this phenomenology varies across individuals, and how it breaks down in neurological and psychiatric conditions. [See recent review of this work in Annual Review of Psychology].

See full list of publications.