“Although we admit that the rat is bombarded by stimuli, we hold that his nervous system is surprisingly selective as to which of these stimuli it will let in at any given time... the incoming impulses are usually worked over and elaborated in the central control room into a tentative, cognitive-like map of the environment...indicating routes and paths and environmental relationships, which finally determines what responses, if any, the animal will finally release.”
- Edward C. Tolman, Cognitive maps in rats and men (1948)
The ultimate research goal of our laboratory is to uncover how the brain forms and retrieves memory. We are particularly interested in the brain functions subserving event memory or episodic memory. Episodic memory is a type of memory that entails discrete events associated with unique temporal and spatial contexts. For example, do you remember when and where you had your dinner last night? Can you recall any particular incident that happened during your dining last night? While you try to remember and describe the details to answer these questions, various structures in the medial temporal lobe (e.g., hippocampus) actively work together to retrieve relevant memories based on now less vivid cues stored in the brain. Amnesic patients (e.g., H.M.) who have damage in these brain structures exhibit episodic memory loss. Furthermore, other brain regions can modulate those memories dynamically. For example, events that are emotionally stimulating or that require more attention are likely to be remembered more vividly.
Our laboratory particularly focuses on detailed neural processes (e.g., pattern completion) proposed by computational models that are presumably necessary to support mnemonic components of memories that are episodic in nature. Behavioral tasks are designed to test critical neural processes to form and retrieve episodic-like memory in rodents in combination with state-of-the-art electrophysiological and pharmacological techniques.