PAD Seminar, Dr Janice Chen

Brain dynamics underlying memory for continuous natural events

The world confronts our senses with a continuous stream of rapidly changing information. Yet, we experience life as a series of episodes or events, and in memory these pieces seem to become even further organized. How do we recall and give structure to this complex information? Recent studies have begun to examine these questions using naturalistic stimuli and behavior: subjects view audiovisual movies and then freely recount aloud their memories of the events. We find brain activity patterns that are unique to individual episodes, and which reappear during verbal recollection; robust generalization of these patterns across people; and memory effects driven by the structure of links between events in a narrative. These findings construct a picture of how we comprehend and recall real-world events that unfold continuously across time.


Janice Chen is an Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Her research aims to understand how we construct and retrieve memories of complex real-world episodes. She uses realistic stimuli (such as movies and narratives) and behaviors (such as freely narrated recall) that contain rich natural semantics and unfold continuously across multiple timescales. Using novel between-subjects temporal and spatial pattern analysis methods, she examines how mnemonic and sensory systems operate together dynamically to create the present moment.

For access to this seminar, please register here, a link will be sent to you within a few days of the talk.