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 existing 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?

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, but how our brains dynamically integrate those concepts into existing networks of knowledge. We combine behavioral experiments with cutting-edge neuroimaging (fMRI), virtual reality environments, and sleep studies. Because studying the brain generates immense amounts of information, 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. By exploring the deep connections between perception, memory, and sleep, we aim to uncover the core principles of how we build our understanding of the world around us.