DEPARTMENT of PSYCHOLOGY

2023-2024 Psychology Department
Colloquium Speaker Series
presents

Charan Ranganath, Ph.D.
Director, Memory and Plasticity (MAP) program
Professor, Center for Neuroscience & Dept. of Psychology
University of California at Davis, USA

“Why (and how) We Remember”

We often study the ability to remember events, aka episodic memory, with paradigms that implicitly assume that the purpose of memory is to store and replay the past. Most memory researchers would agree, however, that this is an inaccurate assumption. Our recollections are incomplete, filled in with inferences at the moment of reconstruction, and updated each time they are recalled. All of these characteristics suggest that the human brain is optimized for selective recollection of what is new, surprising, or significant, and that we infuse recollections with meaning in order to imagine both the present and the future. I will present empirical evidence for how interacting brain networks recombine core elements about people, places, and situations in order to comprehend events and reconstruct episodic memories, and consider what this evidence might suggest about aging and memory. Finally, time permitting, I will present recent work using computational modeling to show how memories may be updated during recollection, and its implications for many basic phenomena in memory.

Monday, March 18, 2024
12:30-1:45pm
390 Gilmer Hall