emotion & memory
The influence of saliency of emotion in everyday life is prominent. In particular, emotion has opposing influences on memory in humans, that is, the central gist is well remembered but details are often forgotten. We aim to study how the brain maintains a balance of gist and details and how a disrupted memory system can lead to psychiatric disorders, such as overgeneralizaion of emotional memories.
EVENT COGNITION
We experience the world continuously while our memory is constructed as sequences of segmented events. The ability to segment continuous experiences into meaningful events (i.e., event segmentation) determines how memory is stored and later retrieved for solving new tasks. We aim to build a mechanistic understanding of event segmentation and how it shapes episodic memory in humans.
sleep & memory
We spend a third of our life sleeping. During sleep, the brain processes and stores information obtained throughout the day, transferring it into memories, which is essential for good performance in daily tasks. We aim to look for brain signals at single cell, population level, and network scale that support this critical day-to-day cognitive process.