Graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to join the speaker for lunch after the seminar. To sign up for a spot, please email: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu 

Chris Baldassano
Department of Psychology
Dynamic Memory Lab
Columbia University

Building new memories using mental maps of space and time

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. Research in my lab combines behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging methods to investigate how prior knowledge of temporal and spatial structure impacts perception and memory, by allowing participants to draw on their real-world experiences or build detailed expertise in controlled yet naturalistic domains. I’ll discuss our recent studies showing how the brain’s internal cognitive models can be used to organize event perception in narratives, structure spatial memories in virtual reality, and creatively combine existing schemas to generate robust episodic memories for new episodes. 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.

A pizza lunch will be served. Please bring your own beverage.

We will also stream this seminar via Zoom.
For the link, please email: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu