How is information remembered?

If perception is already a reconstruction, memory is a far more brutal one: hours of experience compressed into a few minutes you could recount. That compression cannot be uniform — something has to decide which slivers are worth keeping. My current line of work argues that continuous experiences are represented as a subset of key moments, which are somewhat different from event boundaries, and that they play a crucial role in memory and comprehension. Explore more below:

How are continuous experiences represented and remembered in the brain? Not all moments are equal. I ask people to watch a film and pick the frames that best tell its story — a storyboard. People agree strikingly well on which frames matter. Those same moments are when viewers' brains fall into sync with each other in the… Read more → Are key moments just event boundaries? No. And which moments get picked depends on when you ask: choosing in real time during a film gives a different set than choosing afterward — a hint that the unfolding narrative itself shapes what registers as important. Read more → How do we update information when comprehending narratives, and how does that change as we age? Readers construct situation models of the events described in a text and update these models at points of change. We evaluated age-related changes in situation model updating with fMRI in 20 young and 20 older adults… Read more →