Guest Presenter: Dr.Chris Baldassano (Assistant Professor of Psychology, Columbia University)

Talk Title: Maps, Schemas, and Scripts for Event Perception and Memory

Abstract: 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 lab’s recent projects have explored the ways in which this schematic knowledge is constructed (during a single experiment and across developmental timescales) and strategically deployed during event perception, prediction, and memory. I will describe our ongoing work developing new experimental and analysis techniques for conducting functional MRI experiments using movies, stories, poetry, games, virtual reality, and “memory experts” to study complex naturalistic schemas.