Category: Research

Congratulations to graduate student Ata Karagoz on another first-author publication! Building on work from Wouter Kool and the Control and Decision Making Lab, Ata modified a two-stage sequential decision-making task – designed to dissociate between model-free and model-based decisions – to investigate how we build internal representations of our environment, and how this “cognitive map” […]

Congratulations to Ata Karagoz, PhD candidate in the Complex Memory Lab, on the publication of his first-author manuscript! Using a publicly available fMRI dataset in which individuals watched the film The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ata demonstrated that social information, such as character identity and semantic relatedness between characters, can be decoded throughout subregions of the […]

Research from Zachariah Reagh, head of the Complex Memory Lab, and Charan Ranganath, head of the Dynamic Memory Lab at UC Davis, was recently highlighted in a press release from Washington University in St. Louis. The paper, titled “Flexible reuse of cortico-hippocampal representations during encoding and recall of naturalistic events,” has now been featured across […]

We are pleased to share a new paper from CML PI Zach Reagh, titled “Flexible reuse of cortico-hippocampal representations during encoding and recall of naturalistic events,” out now in Nature Communications. Congratulations, Zach! Although every life event is unique, there are considerable commonalities across events. However, little is known about whether or how the brain […]

Congratulations to Angelique Delarazan, third-year graduate student in the CML, on her new publication! The paper, titled “Aging impairs memory for perceptual, but not narrative event details,” is out now in Learning & Memory. Memory is well known to decline over the course of healthy aging. However, memory is not a monolith and draws from […]

Drs. Zach Reagh and Mark McDaniel recently received funding for a collaborative project through the Seeding Projects for Enabling Excellence & Distinction (SPEED) program here at Washington University in St. Louis. The project, titled Dissociating exemplar vs. abstraction-oriented learning in the human brain, seeks to define the neural mechanisms that support and characterize individual differences […]

Congratulations to Angelique Delarazan, a second-year graduate student in the CML, on her new preprint, titled “Aging impairs memory for perceptual, but not narrative event details.” Memory decline is a hallmark of aging. However, memory is a combination of processes and representations, not all of which may be equally vulnerable in the aging brain. Our […]

Kudos to Ata Karagoz, a second-year graduate student in the CML, on his recent preprint titled “The construction and use of cognitive maps in model-based control.” This project, a collaboration between our group and Wouter Kool, uses a validated decision making task and asks how representations of the task structure influence their use of cognitive […]

We are pleased to announce a new paper titled “The hippocampus constructs narrative memories across distant events” published in Current Biology. This work was led by Brendan Cohn-Sheehy, a recent PhD graduate from the Dynamic Memory Lab at UC Davis, in collaboration with CML graduate student Angelique Delarazan. This work was highlighted in Psychology Today […]

Congratulations to Drs. Zach Reagh and Wouter Kool, who were recently awarded McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience funding for a collaborative project! The McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience aims to enhance systems and cognitive neuroscience at WUSTL by supporting pilot studies and collaborative research. Learn more about the McDonnell Center and the studies they support […]