Nicole Rust

What in the brain drives answers to the question, “Have you seen this before?” or “How happy are you right now?”. While different in many ways, memory and mood are both forms of learning that happen continuously throughout our lives. To understand how the brain supports these mysterious functions, my lab combines investigations of human behavior, measurements and manipulations of neural activity, and computational modeling. One emphasis in our work is arriving at algorithmic (or mathematical) descriptions of how populations of neurons signal memory and mood percepts that are intermingled with representations of other types. A complementary emphasis focuses on understanding how memory and mood are shaped from a dynamical systems perspective.