Dr Deborah Talmi

My research examines how motivationally significant experiences shape cognition: why emotional, rewarding and painful events command attention, how they are represented and retrieved from memory, and how prior knowledge and current contexts contribute to subjective experience. Across these domains, I combine behavioural experimentation, cognitive neuroscience and formal modelling to identify common mechanisms and explain consequential differences between individuals.

Much of my work has concerned emotional episodic memory, beginning with studies that distinguished the contributions of attention, semantic relatedness and distinctiveness from effects more properly attributable to emotion itself, and extending to the role of context in encoding and retrieval, the neural representation of emotional experience, and the influence of memory on later decisions. This programme produced the first formal retrieved-context model of emotional memory recall, recognised by the British Psychological Society Cognitive Psychology Section, and now includes work on event structure, reconstructive retrieval, involuntary memory and the contribution of episodic retrieval to model-based decision-making. My work on pain approaches the same general problem from the perspective of perception, using hierarchical Bayesian models to establish how sensory evidence, expectations and individual dispositions are combined in constructing experience.

Throughout, I have sought to examine established theories, using converging methods, open science and constructive adversarial collaboration to develop precise accounts of when motivational significance alters cognition, when it does not, and why its influence varies between people.

Interested in reading our publications or joining the lab? Please check the lab website using the link to the right.