Russell Epstein
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Goddard Labs, Room 522
3710 Hamilton Walk
Behavioral Neuroscience; Cognitive Neuroscience; Memory and Learning; Sensation and Perception
Specific Research Areas
Neural mechanisms underlying high-level vision and spatial navigation.
Research Synopsis
My lab studies the neural mechanisms underlying visual scene perception, event perception, object recognition, and spatial navigation in humans. We are interested in both perception and memory; thus, for example, our research on navigation explores topics in both scene/place/landmark recognition and spatial memory. Recent work has focused on using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other cognitive neuroscience techniques to understand how scenes, objects, landmarks, events, and environmental spaces are represented in specific brain systems.
PSYC 149 Cognitive Neuroscience
PSYC 449 Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousnes
PSYC 600 (Proseminar) Cognitive Neuroscience
Advisees
Ainsley Bonin [Psychology Graduate Student]
Linfeng (Tony) Han [Psychology Graduate Student]
Marchette, S.A., Vass, L.K., Ryan, J. &Epstein, R.A.(2014). Anchoring the neural compass: Coding of local spatial reference frames in human medial parietal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 17 (11): 1598-1606.
Epstein, R.A. & Vass, L.K. (2014). Neural systems for landmark-based wayfinding in humans. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B, 369 (1635).
MacEvoy, S.P. & Epstein, R.A. (2011). Constructing scenes from objects in human occipitotemporal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 14 (10), 1323-1329.
Morgan, L.K., MacEvoy, S.P., Aguirre, G.K. & Epstein, R.A. (2011). Distances between real-world locations are represented in the human hippocampus. Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 1238-1245.
Epstein, R.A. (2008). Parahippocampal and retrosplenial contributions to human spatial navigation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12: 388-396.