Nick Turk-Browne, PhD

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema Professor of Psychology

Director of the Wu Tsai Institute

Yale University

Host(s): Daphna Shohamy (Faculty) 

Learning and memory in the infant brain

Theories of human learning and memory rest almost entirely on adults and older children, neglecting our most prolific period of learning in life: infancy. This gap reflects the challenge of studying the infant brain. Traditional infant methods like EEG and fNIRS are unable to resolve memory systems deep in the brain, including the hippocampus. I will present our work adapting fMRI, the gold standard for studying the mature human hippocampus noninvasively, to awake infants and toddlers. Our studies begin to reveal how hippocampal functions for statistical learning and episodic memory develop over the first two years, pointing toward a new account of the mysterious infantile amnesia that all humans come to experience.

Relevant Publications: 

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants

The ubiquity of episodic-like memory during infancy

About Nick Turk-Browne, PhD

Nick Turk-Browne is Director of the Wu Tsai Institute and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema Professor of Psychology at Yale University, with appointments in Neurosurgery, Psychiatry, and the Child Study Center. He received a bachelor’s in cognitive science and artificial intelligence from the University of Toronto and a doctorate in cognitive psychology from Yale, and he previously served on the faculty at Princeton University. His lab brings an integrative perspective to cognition and development, studying how humans perceive, attend, learn, and remember. This work combines behavioral psychophysics, brain imaging, intracranial recordings, and computational modeling, including methods the lab pioneered for fMRI in awake infants and toddlers. He has received awards from the American Psychological Association, Vision Sciences Society, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and Society of Experimental Psychologists, as well as the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.