I am currently a PhD student in the Keinath Lab at the
University of Illinois at Chicago Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Psychology.
Our lab conducts both rodent (calcium imaging) and human research (virtual reality).
Research Summary: Mammals require the ability to navigate the world flexibly and efficiently which is dependent upon the maintenance of complex representations of the relationships between content in the world. Early experimental behavioral psychology proposed that mammals maintained a systematic organization of knowledge that spanned all domains of behavior, these relational structures came to be known as cognitive maps. Though originally thought to be complex representations that generalize to spatial and non-spatial domains, cognitive maps' biggest influence in cognitive neuroscience has been in the study of spatial behaviors. This traditional view posits that activity in the Hippocampus provides an individual with an explicit Euclidean representation, or map of space. Mounting evidence has shown that the traditional view of cognitive maps does not account for phenomena exhibited by the hippocampal circuit such as behavioral dependence and sensitivity to context and reward, nor does it reconcile well-known hippocampal phenomena such as inference and generalization. The alternative view proposes that cognitive maps in the hippocampus are predictive representations of state transition structures which conjunctively encode various cognitive and sensory features spanning spatial and non-spatial domains. My research aims to disentangle the relative contributions of spatial and non-spatial determinants to cognitive maps.
Research Summary: Mammals require the ability to navigate the world flexibly and efficiently which is dependent upon the maintenance of complex representations of the relationships between content in the world. Early experimental behavioral psychology proposed that mammals maintained a systematic organization of knowledge that spanned all domains of behavior, these relational structures came to be known as cognitive maps. Though originally thought to be complex representations that generalize to spatial and non-spatial domains, cognitive maps' biggest influence in cognitive neuroscience has been in the study of spatial behaviors. This traditional view posits that activity in the Hippocampus provides an individual with an explicit Euclidean representation, or map of space. Mounting evidence has shown that the traditional view of cognitive maps does not account for phenomena exhibited by the hippocampal circuit such as behavioral dependence and sensitivity to context and reward, nor does it reconcile well-known hippocampal phenomena such as inference and generalization. The alternative view proposes that cognitive maps in the hippocampus are predictive representations of state transition structures which conjunctively encode various cognitive and sensory features spanning spatial and non-spatial domains. My research aims to disentangle the relative contributions of spatial and non-spatial determinants to cognitive maps.
