Context and Episodic Memory Symposium (2020)

Emotional experiences are known to be remembered differently than non-emotional experiences. Here, we investigated the effects of negative and positive emotion on memory recall, testing two strategies thought to improve the accessibility of memories.

We found that negative memories tended to be more readily accessible than neutral and positive memories. However, a retrieval cue shifts the accessibility bias toward positive items in memory. Retrieval practice improves overall accessibility for items in memory.

Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting (2020)

Episodic memories contain a wealth of multimodal details, but less is known about the timing of neural processes supporting the reconstruction of different kinds of memory features.

Here, we found that alpha and beta desynchronization is associated with the quality of episodic memory, that is, how well multiple features are reconstructed. Desynchronization scaled with the number of features retrieved and how well they were reconstructed. There is also some evidence for differences in the timing and neural processes involved in recovering different kinds of memory features.

These results are consistent with accounts linking alpha/beta desynchronization to the recovery of episodic information and activity in the posterior medial cortico-hippocampal network.

Context and Episodic Memory Symposium (2019)

Emotion is known to influence memory, but less is known about how people remember naturalistic emotional events.

Here, we found that negative events were recalled most frequently during free recall, suggesting that negative information is more readily available in memory. However, upon receiving a cue, positive events were recalled more frequently than both negative and neutral. This suggests that a retrieval strategy, like cueing, can increase accessibility of positive information over negative information in memory.

Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting (2018)

Using EEG, we aimed to characterize neural markers of inattention that predicted forgetting of faces. We found that fluctuations in attention (specifically for the P3 and LPC event-related potential components) were associated with neural activity patterns that are similar to those that predicted subsequent memory for faces.