Event Details:
Join the speaker for coffee, cookies, and conversation before the talk, starting at 11:45am.
Building neural representations for continuous realistic experiences
Abstract
Our everyday experiences consist of familiar sequences of events in familiar contexts, and we use our memories of the past to understand the present and make predictions about the future. Recent work from my lab combines behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging methods to investigate how prior knowledge of temporal structure allows us to generate predictions, organize experiences into events, and construct durable memories. Our studies employ stories, movies, virtual reality, and games, allowing participants to draw on their real-world experiences or build detailed expertise in controlled yet naturalistic domains. These studies argue for a central role of top-down and anticipatory processes in constructing high-level representations of events in the brain and creating durable sequence memories.
Christopher Baldassano, PhD
Columbia University
Christopher Baldassano is currently an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Columbia University. He was an undergraduate in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, received his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University, and was a postdoc at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. His lab's research focuses on how knowledge about the world - including semantic knowledge, temporal structure, spatial maps, or schematic scripts - is used to understand and remember complex naturalistic experiences. By applying machine learning techniques to data from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, his work aims to uncover how dynamic representations in the mind and brain during perception lead to the formation of event memories.
Hosted by - Cameron Thomas Ellis (Scaffolding of Cognition Team, view host profile below)
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About the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Seminar Series
The Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute seminar series brings together the Stanford neuroscience community to discuss cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary brain research, from biochemistry to behavior and beyond.
Topics include new discoveries in fundamental neurobiology; advances in human and translational neuroscience; insights from computational and theoretical neuroscience; and the development of novel research technologies and neuro-engineering breakthroughs.
Unless otherwise noted, seminars are held Thursdays at 12:00 noon PT.
Questions? Contact neuroscience@stanford.edu
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