Our laboratory investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms by which humans form and organize memories through internal “cognitive maps” that span both sensory and abstract domains. Focusing on the hippocampus as a hub for integrating multisensory inputs, we leverage the human sense of smell, a non-traditional modality, to probe how sensory information is transformed into coherent episodic representations. We also examine the formation and retrieval of idiosyncratic autobiographical memories, characterizing how continuous experience is parsed into discrete memory episodes and how disruptions in these dynamics contribute to disorders such as PTSD. By combining studies in healthy individuals with clinically relevant cohorts, our work aims to establish new principles of memory organization and identify potential targets for intervention.

Methods we use:

• Behavioral and psycho-physiological paradigms: Olfactory tasks custom-tailed to fingerprint perception at an individual level.
• Physiology of respiration and its link to cognition: Cutting edge wearable tech devices to monitor and log respiratory signals at unprecedented ease and detail
• Neuroimaging & computational modeling: fMRI analyses paired with advanced machine-learning and representational-similarity approaches to map sensory-cognitive transformations.
• Multivariate pattern analysis: Cross-modal decoding to link neural patterns elicited by odors, visual scenes, and conceptual stimuli to mnemonic representations.
• Electrophysiology: intracranial recordings to characterize temporal dynamics of event-segmentation signals in the hippocampus.