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My lab studies perception and cognition using the methods of experimental psychology and neuroscience. One of our primary interests is in how people parse ongoing activity into meaningful events. The sensory world has been described as "a blooming, buzzing confusion," yet we seem to talk and think about activity as consisting of a modest number of discrete events. My lab's work suggests that this is so because specialized brain systems form stable representations that chunk intervals of time into coherent events, and chunk events into larger super-events. This segmentation is adaptive—people who don't segment activity very well also don't remember it as well later.
A second primary interest of the lab is in mental imagery. When we solve spatial reasoning problems—like how to pack bags in a trunk or navigate home from the store—many of us have the impression that we form and manipulate mental images of spatial situations. Our research supports this intuition. The findings also suggest that we may have several specialized brain systems for doing different sorts of mental image transformations. This specialization may help explain individual differences in cognitive abilities and cognitive deficits in brain damage, and may prove important for training people on spatial cognitive tasks. |
B.A. in Cognitive Science, Yale University, May 1992 (awarded magna cum laude, with the Intensive Major in Psychology).
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M.A. in Cognitive Psychology, Stanford University, December 1996.
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Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, Stanford University, September 1999.
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- Experimental Psychology (Psychology 301)
- Cognitive Neuroscience of Film (Psychology 488/Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology 4488)
- Advanced Cognitive Psychology (Psychology 5087)
- Current Debates in Psychology (Psychology 4702)
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| I enjoy playing music, cooking, and endurance sports. However, as the happy parent of a 5-year-old and a 22-month-old, the music is mostly "the wheels on the bus," the cooking tends toward macaroni and cheese, and the endurance sports are piggy-back rides and chasing kids down for bath time. |
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Speer, N. K., Vettel, J. M., & Jacoby, L. L. (2006). Event understanding and memory in healthy aging and dementia of the Alzheimer type. Psychology & Aging, 21, 466-482.
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Zacks, J. M., Speer, N. K., Swallow, K. M., Braver, T. S., & Reynolds, J. R. (2007). Event perception: A mind/brain perspective. Psychological Bulletin, 133(2), 273-293
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Speer, N. K., Reynolds, J. R., & Zacks, J. M. (2007). Human brain activity time-locked to narrative event boundaries. Psychological Science, 18(5), 449-455.
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Zacks, J. M. & Swallow, K. M. (2007). Event Segmentation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 80-84(5).
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Reynolds, J. R., Zacks, J. M., & Braver, T. S. (2007). A computational model of event segmentation from perceptual prediction, Cognitive Science, 31, 613-643.
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