Presenting at Symposium
Here's Deborah presenting at the symposium on the effect of emotion on relational memory, which was part of this year's Cognitive...
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Exploring the Mechanics of Emotion and Memory
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge
About The Lab
To increase our chances of survival, our brains constantly try to predict what might happen next. Feelings may be how we experience the predictions our brains make about our future prospects. Our research aim is to be able to predict how an individual would feel in the future. To do this, we are investigating the mechanisms that the brain uses to encode, maintain, and retrieve personal memories and how it uses information to construct our subjective feelings. We would like to be able to predict from what we know about a person and their environment which one of their experiences would come to mind in a particular context, and how they would integrate what they know into a particular feeling.
In the lab, we conduct experiments, which typically involve testing healthy adult volunteers on computerised tasks. We primarily use experimental psychology methods that follow the traditional approaches of cognitive psychology. For example, to bring emotion into the lab we vary the emotional content of images a person sees, pay them money to recall a particular set of items, or ask them to endure painful stimulations of the skin. In our experiments we often take quantitative measures of self-reported emotion, attention and memory; peripheral psychophysiological measures, such as skin conductance and eye movements; and neuroimaging measures, including M/EEG and fMRI.
Our Research
Why Do Emotional Experiences Come To Mind So Easily?
We have developed a theoretical framework for emotional memory, building on retrieved-context memory models, called the emotional Context Maintenance and Retrieval model. This is a mathematical model, a close variant of the CMR model developed at Mike Kahana's Computaitonal Memory Lab. It predicts what an individual will recall. Much of our current research attempts to test, develop, and extend that theory and also check whether it explains motivated memory effects.
Why Do Emotional Experiences Feel The Way They Do?
We built a mathematical model that predict how someone would feel given who they are, what they know, and what they experience. Much of our work with emotional stimuli is inspired by the predictive coding or "Bayesian Brain" framework, which we use to explain the intensity of felt pain.
Animal Models of Emotional Memory
Together with collaborator Professor Amy Milton, we are exploring back-translations of our research findings using emotional variants of the what-where-which task.
How To Get Involved
We offer the opportunity for students and researchers to join us at the lab and have compiled information on funding that you may be able to access. To learn more about this please click the button below.
The public is also welcome to volunteer their time take part in the research. We use a platform to organise sign-ups for volunteers, named SONA. To view more information about our studies and to sign up, you will have to create an account on the website. Once your account is created, you will be asked to complete a short form with further details about you, which help us determine whether you’re eligible for the studies. Once that is completed, you will be able to see available studies and their time-slots. To start this process on the SONA platform click the Volunteers button below.
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Latest News
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Get In Touch
Address: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge, Downing St., Cambridge CB2 3EA, United Kingdom
Email: dt492@cam.ac.uk
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