Memory is central to who we are and how we behave, with knowledge about the past informing thoughts and decisions in the present. Learning and memory provide critical knowledge that guides everyday activities, from remembering to take medications or recognizing previously encountered people, places, and things, to representing our goals and navigating our worlds.

The research objectives of the Stanford Memory Laboratory are to understand the psychological and neural mechanisms that build memories and enable their expression, as well as how these mechanisms change with age and disease. Current research directions – which combine behavior, brain imaging, virtual reality, and computational approaches – include:

  • delineating how cognitive control and attention modulate learning and memory
  • specifying the mnemonic computations and representations supported by the hippocampus and medial temporal cortex, and their interactions with frontoparietal networks
  • examining how memory performance in healthy older adults relates to brain structure and brain function, and to molecular and genetic risks for Alzheimer's disease

More details about our work can be found under Research and Publications

 

 

 

In Press & Just Out

  • Oxford Handbook of Human Memory. Thank you to all of the authors for contributing outstanding chapters!  – now available
  • Brain Science for Lawyers, Judges, and Policymakers – now available & Berkeley Judicial Institute program 
  • Trelle et al – Plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 is sensitive to early cerebral amyloid accumulation and predicts risk of cognitive decline across the Alzheimer’s disease spectrum – Alzheimer's & Dementia
  • Sheng et al – Top-down attention and Alzheimer's pathology impact cortical selectivity during learning, influencing episodic memory in older adults – Preprint
  • Schwartz et al – Attending to remember: Recent advances in methods and theory – Preprint
  • Tran et al – Age-related differences in the predictive relationship between sustained attention and associative memory and memory-guided inference. – Preprint
  • Bonnen et al – Medial temporal cortex supports computational visual inferences – Preprint
  • Fernandez et al. (2024). Encoding and the medial temporal lobe. In M. J. Kahana & A. D. Wagner (Eds.). Oxford Handbook of Human Memory, pp. 650-688. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – Preprint
  • LaRocque et al. (2023). When multi-voxel pattern similarity and global activation are intertwined: Approaches to disentangling correlation from activation – bioRxiv

News & Events

  • From Our Neurons to Yours: How we remember, why we forget – podcast
  • Douglas Miller receives Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship. Congratulations, Douglas!
  • Alex He joins the Stanford Memory Lab; welcome, Alex!
  • Jintao Sheng receives Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience Postdoctoral Scholar Award. Congratulations, Jintao!
  • Haopei Yang receives a 2024 McKnight Clinical Translational Research Scholarship in Cognitive Aging and Age-Related Memory Loss. Congratulations, HY!
  • Tyler Bonnen receives University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship. Congratulations, Tyler!
  • Ali Trelle takes Instructor position in Stanford School of Medicine and is awarded an F99/R00 from the NIA. Congratulations, Ali!
  • Stanford Undergradates interested in research –– contact us to get involved!