Humans are agents: our choices actively shape the trajectory of events in our lives. These choices rely on personal knowledge and preferences that can affect later memory. In this behavioral project, we studied how people’s memory of a naturalistic sequence of events is altered when their choices control the future using choose-your-own-adventure stories. We also examined how memory performance is affected in the face of denial of choices. 

Memory enables us to use past experiences to guide present action. But how can we restore or maintain the previous narrative context in the face of interruptions in our environments? In this fMRI project, we aimed to study how narrative contexts are built, where it is processed and sustained in the brain, what the hippocampus's role is in this process, and how they relate to subjects' memory performance and self-reported lingering thoughts about the narrative.

We also plan to simulate and test these proposed memory processes using computational models.

Studies of scene perception often focus on brief visual presentation (<1 second). But it may take several seconds, or even minutes, to make sense of a complex scene in real life. As each person takes their own “exploration path” through a visual scene, how does the history of their path influence their understanding of the next moment? In this fMRI study, we tested whether exploration paths during the perception of complex images could predict neural responses within and across individuals.