Dr. Janice Chen is the speaker for CCBBI's fMRI Talk Series on April 3, 2026.
Dr. Chen investigates human memory through the lens of cognitive neuroscience, with particular emphasis on naturalistic stimuli and real-world behaviors. She studied at MIT, Stanford, and Princeton. Dr. Chen is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Her research explores the brain systems underlying episodic memory using narratives, interactive experimental paradigms, and virtual reality environments.
Studying memory for natural events across multiple timescales
Abstract: What will you remember about this moment? Some details of our lives are destined to be forgotten, while others are retained in memory for seconds, minutes, hours, or even years. Information from these different eras of our memories continually influences our thoughts and actions in the present. Furthermore, events in the experiential stream are deeply connected to each other by factors such as shared features and causal influence; this network of connections guides how we engage encoding and retrieval processes during ongoing experience, as well as shapes the organization of episodic memories. I will discuss behavioral and neuroscientific studies examining how the brain implements multiple timescales of memory, and the prominent role that causal connections play in memory for real-world events.