Dartmouth Events

Please join us on Friday, January 8, 2021, at 3:30 p.m., for a virtual colloquium given by Charan Ranganath, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Davis.

Title: The Memory Code: How We Remember and Why It Matters

Abstract:  Few people are satisfied with their memory. Most of us lament our failures to recall where we left our keys or the inability to remember a person's name. I believe that the problem isn't our memory, but rather with the expectation that we should have a photographic, static record of the past. We are surrounded by devices and products of Artificial Intelligence that have the capability to store detailed images and videos of our experiences. However, even products like Siri and Alexa, which incorporate state of the art approaches to Artificial Intelligence, cannot use this data to accomplish tasks that children can do effortlessly. A major limitation of these intelligent machines is that they do not learn in the same way that people do. And although research has identified some functional properties of memory and the distributed brain networks that support these abilities, we still have only a limited picture of how people remember in the real world. My colleagues and I are working to develop a computational framework for how interactions in cortico-hippocampal networks allow us to remember complex, naturalistic events, and to explain how we use memory to understand what is happening in the present and anticipate what is likely to happen in the future. I will present data from the early stages of this project, which point to new directions for the development of computational architectures that emulate human learning.

 Zoom details will be forthcoming.