J. Benjamin Hutchinson
London E1W 1YW, UK
Portland, ME 04101
2nd floor
11th floor
Boston, MA 02115
2nd floor
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
Attention and memory are core aspects of cognition, and they are often studied as though each operates in isolation from the other. My research takes an alternative, more integrative approach, focusing on how and when these processes interact. On the one hand, attention might play a role in successful remembering by selecting appropriate cues from the environment to aid retrieval or by enhancing desired and weakening undesired traces from our memory. On the other hand, memory might impact the way in which we sample the environment by supporting the detection of novel information to be learned or by biasing us toward features and objects that have been useful in the past. In this talk, I will present two lines of research that seek to better understand this bidirectional relationship. In particular, I will describe findings from a series of functional neuroimaging studies designed to explore how the brain implements both attention during remembering and memory during ongoing experience. Lastly, I will also discuss one line of ongoing research which aims to articulate the network dynamics of perceptual and memory-based attention.