Event Location: NSH 1507
Bio: Elissa Aminoff received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2008 under the mentorship of Dr. Moshe Bar and Dr. Daniel Schacter. Her dissertation work focused on uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying contextual associative processing and the insights this provides in visual object recognition and memory related processing. From 2008 to the summer of 2011, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California – Santa Barbara where she focused her efforts on studying individual differences in behavioral and neural mechanisms of memory and contextual processing under the guidance of Dr. Michael Miller. In August, she joined the lab of Dr. Michael Tarr as a postdoctoral fellow and plans to further explore how context is represented and processed in the brain and the influences it has on object recognition.

Abstract: Objects are not randomly distributed in our environment but are clustered in typical contexts. For example, a slot machine is typically found at a casino, along with poker chips, a roulette wheel, playing cards, and dice. Finding a slot machine outside of a casino would be surprising. Through repeated exposure to these recurring contexts, regularities are extracted to form strong associations of highly contextual objects (e.g., a slot machine and a roulette wheel). How are these associations manifested in the brain? I will present a series findings that are woven together to formulate a neural mechanism of contextual processing. This mechanism establishes the relation of different stages of contextual processing with three regions of the cortex: the parahippocampal cortex, the retrosplenial complex, and the medial prefrontal cortex. This framework provides a means to explore how context is involved in the visual processing of our environment and how this processing can affect our subsequent memory.