Event Date
CHARAN RANGANATH, PH.D.
Professor, Department of Psychology
Director, Memory and Plasticity Program
Center for Neuroscience
Center for Neuroengineering & Medicine
UC Davis
ABSTRACT
Time passes in a continuous way, but when we remember, we tend to break up the past into separate chunks of time, or "events". I will present a new program of research in which we are using human neuroscience methods and computational modeling to understand the way in which our brains represent events in memory. Our work suggests that, surprisingly, a great deal of the action happens at the boundaries between events. Moreover, there may be unique computational advantages to forming memories as snapshots at the boundaries, rather than forming moment-by-moment recordings of the entirety of an event. Our findings suggest new insights into the nature of age-related memory problems as well as new approaches to enhance learning in AI agents.
BIO
Charan Ranganath is Director of the Memory and Plasticity Program and a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California at Davis. He has been a pioneer in the use of brain imaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, also known as “episodic memory.” Dr. Ranganath’s lab is investigating how memory is affected by emotion, stress, and curiosity, how memory changes with healthy aging, and how memory is affected by disorders such as epilepsy, stroke, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, his lab is using their basic science advances to develop innovative new approaches to improve artificial intelligence, education, and to enhance episodic memory in healthy people and in those suffering from memory disorders.
Dr. Ranganath has received many awards, including the Samuel Sutton Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution to Human ERPs and Cognition, the Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He was designated as a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow by the US Department of Defense, as a Visiting Professor and Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Sage Center Distinguished Fellow based on his innovative scientific research. He has served as an editor for major neuroscience journals (NeuroImage and the Journal of Neuroscience), and has consulted for neuroscience research funding agencies across the world. His research is currently funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Aging, the Office of Naval Research, and Air Force Research Labs. Dr. Ranganath has served on several review panels for the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation.