How does the human brain transform our everyday sensory experiences into lasting, interconnected knowledge that creates understanding? How do we form new memories and access knowledge in useful ways? What role does sleep play in helping us organize, strengthen, and reconstruct what we have learned? How can we use the tools of computer science to decode complex, subtle patterns of brain activity collected through neuroimaging? How can these methods help answer outstanding clinical and applied questions?

These questions lie at the heart of our research. The Coutanche Lab works at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and computer science to explore human memory, learning, and perception. We investigate not only how we acquire new concepts and memories, but how our brains dynamically integrate them into existing networks of knowledge. To do this, we combine behavioral experiments with cutting-edge neuroimaging (fMRI), virtual reality environments, and sleep studies.

Studying the brain generates immense amounts of data so a major focus of our work is applying and developing new computational tools, such as machine learning, to decode how the human brain represents information across different regions. We also apply these tools through collaborations to answer new questions in other fields, including studies of autism spectrum disorder, numerical cognition, and how the craving brain responds to olfaction. By exploring deep connections in the brain and mind, we aim to uncover core principles of how we build our understanding of the world around us.