Knowledge under the hood: nonconscious heuristics of learning and memory

Abstract: Since utero, we are bombarded by a continuous flow of rich and dynamic input. Somehow, we manage to make sense of this environment. We segment experience, pull away discrete concepts and episodes, and form useful links among them, creating a useful and agile model of our surroundings. This is a tremendous feat from a data processing perspective, and it is of utmost importance, as our internal model determines how we perceive the world and act upon it. The aim of my work is to therefore understand the heuristics that make this possible. I investigate the automatic – unintentional, unaware and even unconscious – processes that underlie the formation and maintenance of knowledge. In this talk I will present key findings from my research, demonstrating how complex statistical regularities are inadvertently extracted from the environment and encoded on the fly, how memory organization happens when we are “offline”, in sleep or idle wake, and how memory reorganization happens every time we draw a memory, and how we can manipulate that. These findings offer insight into how our knowledge is acquired, stored, updated and used, and into the latent mechanisms underlying these processes.