Current Research and Interests

1. Investigation of the role of the hippocampus in spatial navigation and episodic memory: computational modelling and electrophysiological analysis of the function of hippocampal neurons in the rat, functional imaging of human navigation, and neuropsychological experiments on spatial and episodic memory. 2. Investigation of human short-term memory for serial order: computational modelling, functional imaging and psychological experiment.

Research interests

I study the computational basis of human learning and inference. Through a combination of mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments, I try to uncover the logic behind our everyday inductive leaps: constructing perceptual representations, separating "style" and "content" in perception, learning concepts and words, judging similarity or representativeness, inferring causal connections, noticing coincidences, predicting the future. I approach these topics with a range of empirical methods -- primarily, behavioral testing of adults, children, and machines -- and formal tools -- drawn chiefly from Bayesian statistics and probability theory, but also from geometry, graph theory, and linear algebra. My work is driven by the complementary goals of trying to achieve a better understanding of human learning in computational terms and trying to build computational systems that come closer to the capacities of human learners.