How do we represent the outside world inside of our heads?

My research explores how our knowledge of abstract, complex information (the people, places, and things that comprise our world) is represented in the mind and brain. How is this knowledge stored and organized? How does it manifest in neural activity?

How does experience shape the mind and brain?

And importantly, how does experience impact how/where/what information is stored and represented? Our brains are as unique as our fingerprints. How does who we are — our unique combination of preferences, capabilities, memories — shape how we see the world? How does it change our brain?

I pursue these questions with several approaches. Most recently, I have leveraged brain-to-brain neuroimaging analyses, coupled with naturalistic experiment paradigms, to study how brain signals dynamically converge and diverge across people. In particular, I examine how these brain-to-brain couplings change as a function of one's experience. Across studies, my research investigates the effect of experience on neurocognitive representations at different timescales, ranging from moments to decades.