A decade in the making, Memories that Matter: How we remember important things will be coming out in May 2024.

See my page about the book or information from the publisher (Routledge) for more information.

New paper in Psychological Science, led by Victoria Wardell and Dr. Daniela Palombo.

“Memories of our personal past are not exact accounts of what occurred. Instead, memory reconstructs the past in adaptive—though not always faithful—ways. Using a naturalistic design, we asked how the visual perspective adopted in the mind’s eye when recalling the past—namely, an “own eyes” versus “observer” perspective—relates to the stability of autobiographical memories.”

The Journal of Open Source Software has just published it’s 2000th birthday, and reached it’s 7th birthday! The journal just put out a blog post providing an overview of the journal’s growth.

Dr. Madan has been an associate editor at the journal since it’s inception in May 2016.

New paper out in Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology!

“I present three propositions about the relationship between episodic memory and consciousness: (1) Episodic memory is usually associated with conscious retrieval; (2) it is possible to have consciousness without episodic memory; and (3) episodic memory can be accessed without conscious retrieval.”

Dr. Madan will be giving a talk at this year’s British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN) meeting as part of a symposium on Affect-driven learning and information seeking.

“Affective states shape how individuals seek information, form memories, and consequently remember information across development. Understanding the individual differences and physiological underpinnings of affective processes is essential for enhancing healthy information seeking and decision making in real life. This symposium brings together researchers investigating how past decisions, social contexts, rewards, and curiosity influence learning and information seeking.”

Congratulations to RuoChong Zhang on a successful PhD defense!

Congratulations to Yashoda Gopi on a successful PhD defense!

Dr. Madan is co-editing a special issue at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience:

“The high complexity of the human brain inherently underpins the incredible variety of cognitive, motor, and sensory functions. Measuring such complexity may help define a comprehensive feature able to represent the general organization of the brain. Fractal analysis is a framework able to represent highly complex structures or signals and gives complementary and powerful tools for capturing and quantifying brain complexity.”

Dr. Madan is co-editing a special issue at Humanities and Social Science Communications:

“Cognitive shortcuts (or heuristics) and their consequent psychological and behavioural biases can profoundly affect and shape the judgments and decisions we make in our everyday and professional lives. The causes of bias are varied, can be both implicit or explicit, and socially or culturally learned. They may include a lack of regard for statistics and evidence, and environmental factors that compete for our attention. Undoubtedly, cognitive bias is a major contributor to errors, misjudgements and disagreement in many settings.”

New review paper published, led by Yashoda Gopi.

“Here, we review the literature on four approaches for memory rehabilitation and their associated strategies: (1) the restorative approach, aimed at a return to pre-morbid functioning, (2) the knowledge acquisition approach, involving training on specific information relevant to daily life, (3) the compensatory approach, targeted at improving daily functioning, and (4) the holistic approach, in which social, emotional, and behavioral deficits are addressed alongside cognitive consequences of acquired brain injury.”

Dr. Madan has recently begun as as one of three inagural Open Science Advisors at Psychological Science.

A special issue in Neuroinformatics is now out, including a paper by Dr. Madan providing an overview of many large neuroimaging datasets.