Zach Reagh receives Excellence in Teaching Award

Kudos to Zach Reagh for receiving the “Excellence in Teaching Award in Social Sciences” from the Washington University in St. Louis Student Union! This student-led award recognizes faculty who go above and beyond in the classroom. In the words of one student, Zach “makes the brain not seem like an inanimate object.” Congratulations, Zach!

The CML attends CNS 2024

The Complex Memory Lab recently traveled to Toronto to eat good food, catch up with friends, and share our recent work at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting. Rayna, Savannah, Angelique, and Adi all presented posters. Ata was asked to give a surprise symposium talk when one of the other speakers was unable to make […]

Ceresa, Evie, and Veronica share their work at WashU’s Undergraduate Research Symposium

Congratulations to CML undergraduate researchers Ceresa Munjak-Khoury, Evie Chen, and Veronica Lee for excellent presentations of their work at WashU’s Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium! We are also proud to give a shout-out to CML undergraduate researcher Jahnavi Nair for presenting her work from the Attention and Performance Lab with Dr. Richard Abrams. Great job, all! […]

Nichole Bouffard joins the lab

The Complex Memory Lab is excited to welcome postdoctoral scholar Nichole Bouffard to the lab! Nichole completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Davis where she worked with Arne Eckstrom and an undergraduate student and later with Charan Ranganath as lab manager. Nichole went on to complete her PhD at the University of […]

Zach Reagh named Sloan Research Fellow

Congratulations to Zach Reagh, named a 2024 Sloan Research Fellow by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation! This fellowship provides 2 years of support for fundamental research by early-career investigators and is one of the most prestigious awards in neuroscience. We are beyond proud of Zach and grateful for the support of the Sloan Foundation!

New paper in JEP:General

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” […]

New paper in Neuropsychologia

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 […]

Veronica Lee shares her work at the MOLA Latinx Health Symposium

CML undergraduate student researcher Veronica Lee traveled to Chicago to present her independent research project, titled “Language Exposure Influences Recall Differences in Narrative Memory for Cross-Lingual Processing in Spanish-English Bilinguals,” at the Medical Organization for Latino Advancement‘s Latinx Health Symposium. Veronica’s project investigates the role of encoding and retrieval language on memory for stories in […]

Savannah Born joins the lab

The Complex Memory lab welcomes our newest graduate student, Savannah Born! Savannah joins us from Johns Hopkins University, where she completed her undergraduate education and worked as a lab manager with Drs. Janice Chen and Chris Honey. Her current research interests involve incorporating personality and social psychology to investigate individual differences in interpretation/memory of complex […]

Adi Upadhyayula joins the lab

The Complex Memory Lab is happy to welcome postdoctoral scholar Adi Upadhyayula to the lab! Adi completed his PhD with Dr. Jon Flombaum at Johns Hopkins University in 2021. He then worked as a postdoctoral scholar with Dr. John Henderson at the University of California, Davis. Here at WashU, Adi holds a joint position with […]

The CML at LearnMem 2023

The Complex Memory Lab traveled to Huntington Beach, CA this week to eat good food, frolic along the seashore, and share our recent work at the International Conference on Learning and Memory. Zach chaired a packed symposium session titled “Episodic memory and the not-so-Default Mode Network” with talks from Zach, Alex Barnett, Janice Chen, and […]

Veronica Lee and Jacob Tartakovsky present their work at the Undergraduate Research Symposium

Congratulations to CML undergraduate researchers Veronica Lee and Jacob Tartakovsky for excellent presentations of their research projects at WashU’s Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium! Veronica’s project, titled “Differences in narrative memory for cross-lingual processing in Spanish-English bilinguals,” aims to understand how narrative memory changes if a story are read in one language and recalled in another […]

CML research highlighted as “mundane”

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 […]

Angelique Delarazan presents her work at WUSTL’s annual Graduate Student Research Symposium

Third-year CML graduate student Angelique Delarazan shared her project, titled “Age-related changes in representing and remembering complex events,” at WashU’s annual Graduate Student Research Symposium on April 4, 2023. In this study, Angelique sought to understand how memory for complex events – in this case, an episode of the TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm – […]

New paper: Flexible reuse of cortico-hippocampal representations during encoding and recall of naturalistic events

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 […]

New paper: Aging impairs memory for perceptual, but not narrative event details

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 […]

Zach Reagh & Mark McDaniel awarded SPEED grant

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 […]

Angelique Delarazan receives Lichtenberg Scholarship in Geropsychology

Graduate student Angelique Delarazan was recently awarded the the 2022 Lichtenberg Scholarship in Geropsychology. This scholarship is awarded annually to one student at Washington University in St. Louis who has demonstrated their dedication to geropsychology research. Angelique’s work aims to provide a deeper understanding of how memory for complex, life-like events changes with age. By […]

Rayna Tang joins the lab

The Complex Memory lab is happy to welcome Rayna Tang, a graduate student in Psychological & Brain Sciences! Rayna earned her B.S. in Cognitive Science from the University of Toronto. While in Toronto, she worked in the laboratories of Drs. Michael Mack, Morgan Barense, and Asaf Gilboa. Rayna completed her undergraduate thesis in the Gilboa […]

Ata Karagoz presents his research at RLDM 2022

Complex Memory Lab graduate student Ata Karagoz recently traveled to Providence, RI to share his research at the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM). In collaboration with Wouter Kool, Ata sought to examine how we construct cognitive maps of a given task and how we use these maps to guide goal-directed decisions. […]