Anna Jafarpour is a post-doctoral cognitive neuroscientist working with Dr. Elizabeth Buffalo at the University of Washington and Dr. Robert Knight at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously in her Ph.D. at the University College London, she used machine learning to decode the content of memory and determined the neural dynamics of retrieving visual memories and retaining a sequence of visual items for a short time. In her research, Dr. Jafarpour found that temporal and spatial memories of naturalistic sequences, that are encountered in daily transportation, are distorted with familiarity. Being extremely interested in the impact of everyday life on memory, in her postdoctoral research, she investigated neural responses to contextual expectations in naturalistic stimuli such as speech and movies. Dr. Jafarpour used intracranial EEG from the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortices of epileptic patients to reveal that expectation built from prior knowledge plays a key role in regional neural responses. Most recently, she observed that individual differences in perception and memory of a sequence of events related to the retention capacity of short-term memory. Her current research focuses on the neural circuits for perception and memory of lifelike sequences of events using intracranial EEG and computational techniques.
Read the RFAs:
- BRAIN Initiative Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (K99/R00 Independent Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
- BRAIN Initiative Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (K99/R00 Independent Clinical Trial Required)
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