Synopsis
Most of our work focuses on short-term memory, a.k.a. "working" memory, broadly defined as a general-purpose mental workspace that allows you to remember and manipulate information. Ever repeat a phone number to yourself until you could write it down or mentally add a pair of three-digit numbers? Those are two classic forms of working memory.
Who cares?
Working memory has two limits: the amount of stuff you can store, and how long you can store it for. We can measure these limits in different people, and it turns out that they're strong predictors of scores on tests of general cognitive ability like IQ and SAT scores. Moreover, storage capacity and duration are disrupted in many developmental, learning, psychiatric, and neurological conditions that manifest at different times across the lifespan, and these disruptions tend to persist even when "classic" symptoms associated with these conditions are controlled through therapeutic interventions. That can have a major impact on patients' educational attainment and overall quality-of-life: it's hard to complete a list of tasks if you can only remember that it for a few seconds.
Ok, so what do you do?
Memories are only useful if you can use them in them to do stuff. So, we're interested in how people use information already in memory to decide what to do next, and we study this issue by combining memory tests with non-invasive measurements of human brain activity (EEG and fMRI) and causal tools that allow us to manipulate brain activity (tD/ACS and TMS). To learn more about our recent work, check out our Publications page!