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Postgraduate research: Memory and Perception
The aim of this research programme is to develop comprehensive theoretical accounts of various aspects of human memory and perception, and to explore ways in which these accounts might inform, and be informed by, clinical practice and rehabilitation.
Individual areas of research:
Michael Anderson
This research program investigates the mechanisms underlying forgetting from long-term memory, with special concern for the role of attentional control mechanisms as a cause of memory failure. Interest focuses on the role of inhibition in the resolution of interference during memory retrieval, and also on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the deliberate control of unwanted memories. Modalities include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and cognitive experimentation. The research concentrates on healthy volunteers, and special populations that help to (a) inform the neural basis of memory control mechanisms (e.g neuropsychological patients), or (b) establish the relevance of basic research to issues of clinical significance (e.g., Psychiatric populations). PhD projects include, but are not limited to:
- What brain systems are engaged when people intentionally suppress retrieval of unwanted memories?
- Can people down-regulate hippocampal activity, and if so, what are the consequences for memory?
- How is memory control related to cognitive control more generally, especially motor control?
- How do memories capture attention, and what is an intrusive memory?
- Can memory control be trained, and if so, what neural changes underlie this plasticity?
- What neural mechanisms help us to resolve retrieval interference and how do they cause forgetting?
- Do the neural systems identified in research on memory control provide a good model for disordered control of emotional memories (e.g., PTSD) and exceptional forgetting (e.g. psychogenic amnesia)?
- Can research on memory control be generalized to autobiographical memories, using Sensecam technology?
For more information please see my lab web page, my CBU personal pages or our group page.
Rik Henson
This research programme primarily concerns how our brain remembers things. Specifically, we use the techniques of fMRI and EEG/MEG to examine brain activity as healthy volunteers try to remember things in the laboratory, and relate these findings, via computational modelling, to the memory problems following damage in those brain regions. We are interested in the neural bases of both explicit (conscious) memory and implicit (unconscious) memory, particularly the relationship between recollection, familiarity, and priming, and the relationship between memory and (visual) perception. A deeper knowledge of these different expressions of memory is important for understanding the ubiquitous memory impairments associated with neurological damage, neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia, and normal ageing.
Possible PhD projects are listed here:
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/rik.henson/personal/phdtopics.html
For more information please see my personal pages or our group page.
Niko Kriegskorte
My programme "Object vision and population-code representation" investigates visual object recognition using functional magnetic resonance imaging, computational modelling, and behavioral methods. In particular, we focus on the representation of visual objects in patterns of activity across populations of neurons. You can see some of our findings so far by clicking the link above.
As a grad student or postdoc in my lab, questions you might be investigating include the followings:
- How are faces and objects represented in higher-level ventral-stream regions?
- How does recognition abstract from accidental properties such as view, lighting, and retinal position?
- How are semantic properties and categorical divisions represented in the brain?
- How are individual exemplars (e.g. individual faces) discriminated?
- How do tasks and goals affect the processing and representation of objects?
- What computational models provide the best account of primate object vision?
- How can we best integrate computational models of information processing at the cognitive and neuronal levels into the analysis of brain-activity data.
For more information please see my personal pages or our group page.
Susan Gathercole
My interests are in the cognitive processes of memory, attention, language, and learning. Much of my research focuses on children with developmental disorders in these areas of cognition, and investigates both
i) the nature of the underlying cognitive deficits, and
ii) how these deficits can be ameliorated with either cognitive or educational interventions.
For more information please see my personal pages or our group page.
Dennis Norris
A major theme running through much of the research on spoken word recognition conducted at the Unit in recent years has been the problem of recognising words in continuous speech. In contrast to written language, where there are white spaces between the words, spoken language contains few reliable cues to the location of word boundaries. How do listeners solve the problem of recognising spoken words without first knowing where the words actually are in the input? We have been tackling this, and related problems in spoken word recognition by a mixture of conventional experimental work, both on English and on other languages with contrasting phonological properties, and by the development of a large scale connectionist model of spoken word recognition. Other work concentrates on understanding how spoken words are represented in the mental lexicon and on the issue of whether lexical information can influence the processing of sub-lexical units such as phonemes. PhD work in this area would involve experimental work on spoken word recognition but could also involve computational modelling. We are currently developing a new connectionist model of word recognition and vocabulary acquisition.
A second programme studies short term memory and the relation between short- and long-term memory. Most of this work focusses on memory for serial order in short-term memory, and on how short-term memory contributes to long-term learning. Much of the experimental work is driven by computational models of short-term memory (Page and Norris, 1999). The computational work continues to generate a range of experimental predictions which could form the starting point for a PhD. The PhD could itself include computational work to extend the scope of the model.
Finally we are interested in building on the work in both speech and memory to develop a better understanding of both the memory systems underpinning language use, and the way in which the requirements of language have shaped the memory systems themselves. For more information please see my personal pages or our group page.