Reflections on remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic
When I took responsibility for the move to teach remotely in my department, soon after lockdown was announced in March 2020, I knew that...
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EMOTIONAL COGNITION LAB
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge
NEWS
Here's Deborah presenting at the symposium on the effect of emotion on relational memory, which was part of this year's Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in Toronto. This work is part of our ESRC grant testing the effect of emotion on hippocampal-dependent associative binding.
ABOUT
To increase our chances of survival, our brains constantly try to predict what might happen next. Feelings may be the phenomenological manifestation of predictions our brains make about our prospects.
Our research aim is to understand memory and feelings mechanistically, and to be able to predict mathematically, how an individual would feel and which one of their past experiences would come to mind.
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.
PRACTICALLY AT THE LAB…
Our experiments use highly constrained tasks, typically performed by healthy adult volunteers. We primarily use experimental psychology methods that follow the traditional approaches of cognitive psychology.
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.
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.
CONTACT EMOTIONAL COGNITION LAB
Department of Psychology
University of Cambridge
Downing Site, Cambridge
dt492 AT cam.ac.uk
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