Psychologist and neuroscientist Charan Ranganath’s bestselling new book, "Why We Remember," combines the latest research from his field with his own personal experiences to share how memory actually works and the role it plays in our daily lives.
Professor of Psychology Charan Ranganath and his colleagues are uncovering the science behind memory to develop biomarkers that can identify individuals with preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. The hope is that early detection will allow for successful intervention.
Researchers from around the world who study the effects of meditation training and scholars from related fields will gather at UC Davis on Feb. 24 for a daylong summit, “Out of the Lab and Into the World: The Next Chapter of Contemplative Science.”
Babies learn from looking at human faces, leading many parents and childhood experts to worry about possible developmental harm from widespread face-masking during the pandemic. A new study by researchers in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science allays those concerns, finding that 6- to 9-month-old babies can form memories of masked faces and recognize those faces when unmasked.
You’re sitting at home, working at your laptop, and all of a sudden you hear the refrigerator shut off. Before you noticed its sudden silence, were you conscious it was on?
Very young children learn words at a tremendous rate. Now researchers at the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis have for the first time seen how specific brain regions activate as 2-year-olds remember newly learned words — while the children were sleeping. The work is published Oct. 19 in Current Biology.
Unfold, a UC Davis podcast, recently launched its third season with College of Letters and Science researchers talking about “Why Is That Song Stuck in My Head?” The episode examines music, memory and what "earworms" — those songs that get stuck in your head — can teach us about how the brain works.
A new brain imaging study from the Center for Neuroscience at UC Davis shows that the hippocampus is the brain’s storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative.
When we recall a memory, we retrieve specific details about it: where, when, with whom. But we often also experience a vivid feeling of remembering the event, sometimes almost reliving it. Memory researchers call these processes objective and subjective memory, respectively. A new study from the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis shows that objective and subjective memory can function independently, involve different parts of the brain, and that people base their decisions on subjective memory — how they feel about a memory — more than on its accuracy.
Joy Geng, a professor in the Department of Psychology and at the Center for Mind and Brain, was recently named a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) for her contributions to the understanding of human cognition.
