The hippocampus, Greek for "seahorse", is often considered the relational memory center of the brain. While it has been studied for years, we are still uncovering new facets to its role - not just in memory, but in other cognitive domains. Currently we are working to develop more sensitive tools to assess changes in hippocampal function, allowing earlier detection and diagnosis of alterations that may be due to traumatic brain injury or pathology. 

Context, whether it be a place, a time, or something else, is a critical part of our memory organization. Returning to, or reinstating, a learned context can trigger the automatic retrieval of related information. Further, context can alter our memories, causing items that share a context to be recalled as closer together than items that are learned across contexts. We are currently studying the utility of these organizational effects & how they are impacted by aging.

Much of how we experience the world is tied to our eyes. Our eyes guide what we will potentially remember, and can reveal what we do remember. In our lab, we use eye-tracking to examine how visual attention helps to form relational memory, as well as how memory can in turn guide eye movements. This includes both conscious and unconscious experiences of memory via eye movements and how those expressions change across the lifespan.

Outside of the lab, daily memory often requires keeping track of multiple moving pieces, overlapping information, and uncertain timelines. To keep up with all of these changing parameters, we often need to apply strategies to maintain our relational memory organization. Much of this is mediated by interactions between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. How we decide what to attend to, how to encode it, and how to later retrieve it depend on multiple processes that allow us to integrate and discriminate information over time. How those processes unfold and how they are altered as we age is a key question we are currently investigating.

Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) impact over 2.5 million people a year and can have wide-ranging physical, emotional, and cognitive ramifications. In collaboration with Dr. Melissa Duff at Vanderbilt University,  Dr. Neal Cohen at the University of Illinois, and Dr. Hillary Schwarb at University of Nebraska, we are seeking to understand how TBIs can impact the hippocampal and prefrontal functions that support relational memory, how we can detect even subtle changes in relational memory after a TBI, and how we can use that information to improve long-term outcomes for individuals with TBIs.

The CDC estimates there are potentially 3.8 million concussions per year, with under-diagnosis likely deflating that number from the real toll. Further, recent evidence suggests sub-concussive head injuries may be multiplicative, leading to long-term consequences. This work seeks to understand the neural and cognitive changes that occur in athletes engaged in high-impact sports. We seek to understand how concussions and sub-concussive hits can alter the brain structures/functions that support memory, as well as other domains. This work is done in collaboration with Dr. Stanley Hunter and Dr. Max Kammerman at United Health Services as well as Dr. Vipul Lugade and Dr. Chao Shi at Binghamton University.