How memories shape our perception of the present

What are mem­o­ries made of? Do dif­ferent parts of our brain light up when we per­ceive an event than when we remember it after­ward? What role does memory play in directing our atten­tion to spe­cific details in our surroundings?

Cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tist J. Ben­jamin Hutchinson, who recently joined Northeastern’s fac­ulty, is on a quest to find out. The answers could con­tribute to our under­standing of atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tivity dis­order, or ADHD, and other learning con­di­tions as well as lead to strate­gies to help people stay focused when attending to a task.

“In gen­eral, memory and atten­tion have been studied as sep­a­rate aspects of cog­ni­tion,” says Hutchinson, assis­tant pro­fessor in the Depart­ment of Psy­chology, who comes to North­eastern from a post­doc­toral fel­low­ship at Princeton Uni­ver­sity. “By rec­og­nizing their inter­ac­tion, I want to know: How does infor­ma­tion from the past, in the form of mem­o­ries, influ­ence what we pay atten­tion to in the present?”

www.northeastern.edu/news/2017/01/how-memories-shape-our-perception-of-the-present/