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What is memory for? How does it work? What does it do? These questions are, and have always
been, central to psychology precisely because memory is central to our mental life as human beings.
Without it we wouldn’t be able to speak, we wouldn’t know our birthday or age, we would be
surprised every time we looked in a mirror… Life “without memory” has been summed up by renowned
amnesic patient H.M. as one in which every waking moment is “like waking up from a dream.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison boasts considerable strength and breadth in the study of memory.
In the Department of Psychology,
Arthur Glenberg’s early career
produced influential quantitative models that address such phenomena as serial position and context
effects in memory. More recently, he has turned to the broader question of “What memory is for”,
and is a leading advocate of an embodied cognition approach to the study memory and language.
Maryellen MacDonald has carefully
considered the correlation between individual differences in working memory “capacity” and many
types of language processing, and questions the assumption that the former is a cognitive primitive
that enables language functions. Instead, she and her colleagues propose that working memory abilities
and language abilities both emerge from the same interaction of biological and experiential factors.
Her laboratory uses eye tracking and behavioral measures in studies of normal populations, those
with developmental language impairments, and aging and neuropathology.
Brad Postle (whose PhD thesis, incidentally,
centered on studies conducted with H.M.) and his research team study the interrelations of working
memory, attention, general fluid intelligence, and cognitive control. They use experimental psychological,
neuroimaging (i.e., fMRI), neuropsychological, and neurodisruptive (i.e., rTMS) approaches.
Tim Rogers has coauthored the book Semantic Cognition,
a “groundbreaking monograph [that] offers a mechanistic theory of the representation and use of semantic
knowledge”. His research in this domain incorporates connectionist modeling, the study of patients with
memory disorders (particularly, semantic dementia and related neurodegenerative diseases), and
neuroimaging.
Faculty and graduate students who study memory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have access to
outstanding resources to investigate memory, its impairments, and its brain bases, including collaboration
with many other labs on campus. Here is a sample of other laboratories and resources on the UW-Madison
campus that focus on memory research:
Wisconsin Alzheimer's Institute
Dept. of Anatomy: Lewis Haberly
Dept. of Educational Psychology: Charles Kalish
Laboratory of Genetics: Jerry Yin
Institute on Aging
Dept. of Medicine: Drs. Sanjay Asthana and Sterling Johnson
Wisconsin Comprehensive Memory Program
Neuroimaging: The Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior
Dept. of Neurology: Bruce Hermann
Dept of Physiology: Peter Lipton
Dept. of Psychiatry: Ann Kelley
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