How do our brains enable memory and attention?

We study the cognitive and neural foundations of how we process our world, learn new things, and remember our past.

Stylized brain formed from connected beads

About the lab

Understanding the mind, from attention to memory

Our ability to process our surroundings, learn new things, and remember our past determines who we are and how we interact with the world.

The Hutchinson Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience investigates these foundational cognitive processes: we want to know how the brain gives rise to memory and attention, and how the two shape one another. We combine behavioral experiments with neuroimaging to ask how past experience guides what we attend to, and how we attend to memories themselves.

The lab is part of the Oregon Memory Group in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon.

01

Memory-guided attention

How does past experience shape what we attend to in the present? We study the control of selective attention by multiple memory systems.

02

Encoding & retrieval

How do our brains internalize our external world? How does remembering perceptual details interact with processing them through our senses?

03

The neural substrates of memory and attention

We examine where and when in the brain memory-attention interactions take place.

Open science

Our code and tools are public

Experiment tasks, analysis pipelines, and lab tooling live on the lab’s GitHub. Publications update automatically from the PI’s ORCID record.