Marc Howard

Brain, Behavior, and Cognition Program Director
Director: Theoretical Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

We develop mathematical models of cognition and evaluate them against both behavioral and neurophysiological data, providing a bridge between cognition and systems-level neuroscience. We use a combination of mathematical, computational and behavioral tools to evaluate our hypotheses. The topics we investigate are centered on episodic memory, the ability we have to remember specific events situated in a particular spatiotemporal context. At present, our efforts are focused on developing and evaluating a unified mathematical framework to describe how the brain constructs the spatial and temporal context believed to underlie episodic memory. This model appears to have far-ranging implications, leading to research interests in statistical learning, semantic memory, time perception, and reward systems.