Dr Cowell鈥檚 research examines the neural and cognitive mechanisms of memory and visual perception. She studies the mechanisms of healthy cognition, as well as how these functions are disrupted by aging, or by brain damage in the ventral visual stream and medial temporal lobe. Research in the Cowell lab uses computational models, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral studies in humans, to ask questions such as: What are the neural mechanisms of visual pattern completion? Does recollection require the hippocampus, or can it be mediated by other parts of the brain? How does interference cause forgetting, and does this change with age? Dr. Cowell also has an interest in developing novel methods for fMRI analysis, for example using Bayesian hierarchical modeling to characterize the neural-level responses that give rise to the "voxel tuning functions" observed in visual cortex.
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Selected Publications:
Sanders, D.M.W. and Cowell, R.A. (2023). The locus of recognition memory signals in human cortex depends on the complexity of the memory representations. Cerebral Cortex, 33:17, 9835鈥�9849.听.
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Sadil, P.S., Cowell, R.A. and Huber, D.E. (2023). The Push-Pull of Serial Dependence Effects: Every Response is both an Attraction to the Prior Response and a Repulsion from the Prior Stimulus. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.听.
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Sadil, P., Cowell, R.A. & Huber, D.E. (2022) A modeling framework for determining modulation of neural-level tuning from non-invasive human fMRI data. Communications Biology, 5, 1244.听
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Cowell, R.A., Barense, M.D., Sadil, P.S. (2019). A Roadmap for Understanding Memory: Decomposing Cognitive Processes into Operations and Representations. eNeuro, 6(4), ENEURO.0122-19.2019.
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Sadil, P.S., Potter, K., Huber, D.E. and Cowell, R.A. (2019). Connecting the dots without top-down knowledge: Evidence for rapidly-learned low-level associations that are independent of object identity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(6): 1058-1070.