Schemas

…She discusses neural accounts of schemas, distinctions between schemas and cognitive maps, and how these processes change from childhood to adulthood, alongside differences in how researchers define the underlying concepts.

Schemas are known to facilitate learning and memory consolidation in humans and rodents. However, their role in decision making is not well understood and the effects of task factors like risk, novelty, prior knowledge, arousal and attention are under-explored. We designed a new computer-based experiment where participants could firstly explore a list of different author’s paintings or quotes and then select items with the same authorship. Most participants showed improvement in performance, yet factors, including previous progress, risk and novelty conditions, pupil diameter and heart rate, p

…different kinds of situations work (schemas), and also on recollection of specific instances of these situations that we have previously experienced (episodic memory). The consensus around this general view masks deep questions about how these two memory systems interact to support event understanding: How do we build our library of schemas? and how exactly do we use episodic memory in the service of event understanding? Given rich, continuous inputs, when do we store and retrieve episodic memory “snapsh

…Her seminar is entitled "Schemas and schema-mediated memory". To read the abstract and register for the event visit: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/donders-inclusion-3

Understanding and remembering realistic experiences in our everyday lives requires activating many kinds of structured knowledge about the world, including spatial maps, temporal event scripts, and semantic relationships. My recent projects have explored the ways in which we build up this schematic knowledge (during a single experiment and across developmental timescales) and can strategically deploy them to construct event representations that we can store in memory or use to make predictions. I will describe my lab's ongoing work developing new experimental and analysis techniques for conduc