During my PhD, I designed and executed a number of studies on memory retrieval. You can find my dissertation here.

In a collaboration with dr. Janneke Jehee’s Visual Computation group, we combined a task from visual psychophysics with fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis. We investigated whether memory retrieval of a visual stimulus would elicit activity patterns in early visual cortex, as predicted by the cortical reinstatement theory. We found that we could indeed classify the identity of the retrieved stimulus from cortical brain activity, and that the accuracy of retrieval correlated with activity in hippocampus. Find more information on this project here.

In a joint project with dr. Alexander Backus, we investigated the widely held view that the hippocampus acts as a convergence zone for mnemonic information. Convergence zones have several defining characteristics: they are well-connected and represent relevant information for memory. Participants learned associations between stimulus pairs, and performed a memory retrieval task in the fMRI scanner. We found that during retrieval, the hippocampus indeed 1) contains information about the retrieved stimulus category (through representational similarity analysis) and 2) is highly connected (through graph theoretical analysis). Find more information on this project here.