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Cognitive Neuroscience

Research Interests

How do we navigate familiar cities to reach goals? How do we remember the events of our lives? Why are these abilities impaired in memory-related disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease? Can we improve these cognitive processes by further understanding how they work in healthy younger and older adults?

We are a team of cognitive neuroscientists that are fascinated by studying the ways in which we learn and remember information about the world around us. Specifically, we are interested in spatial cognition, with an emphasis on studying navigation and spatial memory for large-scale environments such as cities. In addition to studying spatial cognition, we are interested in studying how we remember the events of our lives (i.e., episodic memory). Decades of research have revealed that spatial context (i.e., the location in which an event takes place) exerts a fundamental influence on our ability to form and retrieve episodic memories; therefore, we are also interested in understanding the connection between spatial cognition and episodic memory.

We study spatial cognition and episodic memory by having participants engage in highly immersive experiences, such as virtual reality and real-world tasks, because these methods better approximate our everyday memories. We aim to find converging evidence across a variety of approaches, including behavior, EEG, and fMRI. We also leverage computational techniques (e.g., machine learning, multivariate analysis, modeling) to analyze the human brain and behavior.

Team

Principal Investigator

Derek J. Huffman (Assistant Professor of Psychology)

Honors Thesis Students

Shuran Yang ’23 (majors: Psychology and Biology: Neuroscience)

Research Assistants

Sinan Yumurtaci ’23 (majors: Computer Science, Economics)

Hannah Guan ’24 (majors: Psychology, Computer Science)

Ainsley Bonin ’24 (majors: Psychology, Mathematical Sciences)

Chandrachud Gowda ’25 (major: Computer Science)

Lab Alumni

Katia Koelliker ’22 (collaboration with Professor Glenn; major: Psychology: Neuroscience)

Lior Colina ’22 (major: Psychology: Neuroscience)

Sophia Merriweather ’23 (major: Psychology: Neuroscience)

Ruby Nunez ’24 (majors: Computer Science, Psychology: Neuroscience)

Chioma Ezuma-Ngwu ’22 (major: Computational Psychology)

Preprints

* Denotes co-first author

*Rollins, L, *Huffman, DJ, Walters, LA, and Bennett, K (2023). Prolonged development of forced-choice recognition when targets are paired with non-corresponding lures. PsyArXiv.

Publications

Crivelli-Decker, J, Clarke, A, Park, SA, Huffman, DJ, Boorman, E, and Ranganath, C (in press). Goal-oriented representations in the human hippocampus during planning and navigation. Nature Communications.

Starrett, MJ, Huffman, DJ, and Ekstrom, AD (2022). Combining egoformative and alloformative cues in a novel tabletop navigation task. Psychological Research.

Huffman, DJ and Ekstrom, AD (2021). An important step toward understanding the role of body-based cues on human spatial memory for large-scale environments. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 33(2):167-179.

Starrett, MJ, McAvan, AS, Huffman, DJ, Stokes, JD, Kyle, CT, Smuda, DN, Kolarik, BS, Laczko, J, and Ekstrom, AD (2021). Landmarks: A solution for spatial navigation and memory experiments in virtual reality. Behavior Research Methods, 53:1046-1059.

Ekstrom, AD, Harootonian, S, and Huffman, DJ (2020). Grid coding, spatial representation, and behavior: Should we assume an isomorphism? Hippocampus, 30(4):422-432.

Huffman, DJ and Ekstrom, AD (2019). A modality-independent network underlies the retrieval of large-scale spatial environments in the human brain. Neuron, 104(3):611-622.e7.

Huffman, DJ and Ekstrom, AD (2019). Which way is the bookstore? A closer look at the judgments of relative directions task. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 19(2):93-129.

Starrett, MJ, Stokes, JD, Huffman, DJ, Ferrer, E, and Ekstrom, AD (2019). Learning-dependent evolution of spatial representations for large-scale virtual environments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(3):497-514.

White, AO, Javier, LK, Goldberg, NR, Boucquey, V, Overman, J, Ochaba, J, Marsh, S, Huffman, D, and Nicholas, A (2017). Front and back flipping for neurobiology! Developing a hybrid upper-division lab course. Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, 16(1):A95-A101.

Ekstrom, A, Huffman, DJ, and Starrett, M (2017). Interacting networks of brain regions underlie human spatial navigation: A review and novel synthesis of the literature. Journal of Neurophysiology, 118(6):3328-3344.

Huffman, DJ and Stark, CEL (2017). The influence of low-level stimulus features on the representation of contexts, items, and their mnemonic associations. NeuroImage, 155:513-529.

Huffman, DJ and Stark, CEL (2017). Age-related impairment on a forced-choice version of the Mnemonic Similarity Task. Behavioral Neuroscience, 131(1):55-67.

Bennett, IJ, Huffman, DJ, and Stark, CEL (2015). Limbic tract integrity contributes to pattern separation performance across the lifespan. Cerebral Cortex, 25(9):2988-2999.

Huffman, DJ and Stark, CEL (2014). Multivariate pattern analysis of the human medial temporal lobe revealed representationally categorical cortex and representationally agnostic hippocampus. Hippocampus, 24(11):1394-1403.

Nashiro, K, Sakaki, M, Huffman, D, and Mather, M (2013). Both younger and older adults have diffculty updating emotional memories. The Journal of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 68(2):224-227.