Cowan Adaptive Learning & Memory Lab

We rely on our ability to remember past experiences to guide our behaviors in the present. Yet, our experiences contain far more information than we can possibly remember. It is therefore adaptive for us to prioritize the retention of goal-relevant, meaningful aspects of experience to help repeat or avoid similar outcomes in the future. To be adaptive, our memory systems must also be able to integrate across related experiences to build up higher-order knowledge about the world. Our research examines the processes that selectively encode, stabilize, and transform new experiences to form adaptive long-term memories.