Mentor: Dr. Keisuke Fukuda
Associate Professor
Project Description
In any awake moment, we are constantly surrounded by rich and ever-changing information. To behave intelligently in such a dynamic environment (e.g., driving through a busy downtown), our mind has to 1) attend to a subset of information that is relevant to the current goal (e.g., traffic lights, street signs, pedestrians crossing the road), 2) hold them in our working memory (WM) to guide our current behavior (e.g., wait until the light is green and turn at the designated street sign after the road is cleared of pedestrians), and 3) store them in long-term memory (LTM) so that we can retrieve them later when we need them (e.g., the name of the streets when we have to re-visit the places again). Although our mind is quite efficient at carrying out such complex mental operations, it is far from perfect. My lab uses a combination of behavioral, electrophysiological, and computational methodologies (e.g., psychophysics, EEG recordings, computational modeling) to examine how attention, WM, and LTM interact to support and hinder our goal-oriented behaviors.
Does this project require the SROP Student to be in-person or remote? In-person
Mentorship Statement
My lab practices an “open lab philosophy” by welcoming trainees with any academic and demographic background so long as they are passionate and driven to make a difference through scientific inquiry into human cognition. Throughout the program, the trainees will receive hands-on research training (e.g., data collection and analyses, literature reviews, presentation and discussion of research findings) by contributing to the ongoing research projects and attending the regular lab meetings as well as individual meetings with the supervisors.