The Johnson Lab studies human memory and considers such issues as the component processes of reflection and consciousness, mechanisms of veridical and distorted memory, memory disorders (resulting from amnesia, frontal brain damage, aging), and the relation between emotion and cognition. We use cognitive/behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques to investigate the following:
What are the basic "processing units" of memory? How are these component processes organized into subsystems and combined within and across subsystems? Can we localize them in terms of brain activity?
How are individual features of experience (e.g., color, shape, location) bound together to create complex memories? Is memory binding an automatic consequence of perceptual binding (our phenomenal experience is, after all, a blue pen on a brown table, not a jumble of separate features: blue, brown, pen, table). Or does memory binding require additional cognitive processes or computations and under what conditions?
How are the memory representations of perception and thought (imagination, dreams, fantasies) alike and how are they different? How are they discriminated, and why are they sometimes confused? What is the role of emotion in memory distortions? More generally, what is the relation between our attributions about the sources of memories, knowledge, and beliefs, and their actual origins?
We are exploring age-related changes in memory in all of the above--in component processes, in binding the attributes of memories, and in source monitoring.
See Prof. Johnson's page for publications and PDFs.