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We are recruiting a PhD student in Psychology or Neuroscience (INP) for Fall 2027
How can we intentionally remove information from working memory?
We examine how people intentionally stop thinking a thought. More specifically, we study the suppression of information from working memory, a process termed maintenance suppression. This is not simply replacing one thought with another, but actively pushing information out of mind each time it comes up. Additionally, our lab works to understand how other cognitive processes impact our ability to intentionally remove information from working memory, including why emotional memories tend to feel "stickier" and more difficult to let go of, and how the meaning of information affects our ability to control what we hold in mind. To study this in the lab, we have developed a novel task – the Directed Removal paradigm – to measure how effectively people can remove information from working memory. This paradigm is flexible enough to incorporate a variety of removal strategies, allowing us to examine both behavioral outcomes as well as the neural mechanisms of removal.
🧩Distraction
How can we resist distractions?
We study how working memory holds up under distraction. Specifically, we look at how the mind adapts on the fly when plans change, how focusing on certain information can protect it from being disrupted, and what subtle errors and blind spots that focus can still leave behind. For example, to better understand how distractions interfere with memory, we developed the TCC-Intrusion mdoel. It proposes that distractions disrupt what we're holding in mind through a single, consistent mechanism - essentially, outside information "leaks in" and competes with what we're trying to remember. This gives us a unified way to explain how and when distraction takes hold.
📐Manipulation
How we can adaptively update information in working memory?
Working memory isn't just a place to store information - it's an active workspace where we constantly reshape and reorganize what we're holding in mind to meet the demands of whatever we're doing. We study how people carry out this mental manipulation, and how motivation plays a role: for instance, whether reward changes how we mentally change information. We also explore how what we're holding in working memory helps us anticipate what's coming next. Rather than simply reacting to the world as it unfolds, our minds are constantly making predictions and working memory plays a key role in that process. We investigate how the contents of working memory interact with knowledge stored in long-term memory to anticipate what will happen in the immediate future, and what happens when those expectations turn out to be wrong.
💭Attention
How does attention influence anxiety and related clinical disorders?
When something feels threatening- whether it's a worrying thought or a distressing mental image, our instinct is often to either fixate on it or push it away. We study how these attentional choices play out in real time and how they shape our anxiety from moment to moment. Does avoiding a scary thought provide relief, or does it make things worse? Does focusing on it help us process it, or does it intensify the distress? To answer these questions, we combine clinical approaches with cognitive tools like working memory tasks and EEG, which lets us track both behavior and brain activity as people navigate threatening thoughts. The goal is not just to understand the science, but to use those insights to develop better treatments for anxiety disorders, OCD, and related conditions.
⚙️Methods
How do we use behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to uncover the brain mechanisms?
To study working memory, we use a range of complementary methods, each one giving us a different window into how the mind works:
Behavioral experiments are the foundation: participants complete computer-based tasks, and we measure how accurate and how fast they are to understand what people can and can't hold in mind.
EEG records electrical activity across the scalp, letting us track brain activity as it unfolds moment to moment, which is ideal for capturing the rapid, split-second processes that working memory depends on.
fMRI trades that moment-to-moment precision for a more detailed map of where in the brain things are happening, revealing which brain regions and networks are involved in different aspects of memory and attention.
Real-time neurofeedback takes this a step further by giving participants live information about their own brain activity as it happens - using either EEG or fMRI - allowing us to explore whether people can learn to regulate their mental states directly.
Finally, multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) applies computational techniques to the rich data generated by these methods. Rather than just asking whether the brain is active, it lets us ask what the brain is representing - essentially "reading" the content of a person's thoughts from patterns of brain and behavioral data.
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