Dr Deborah Talmi

• Why do emotional experiences feel the way they do?
• What makes them come to mind later on?

My lab studies the fundamental cognitive, computational and neurobiological mechanisms that underly the intersection of emotional and cognitive processes, especially memory and subjective reports.

Most of our research is conducted in a laboratory setting, with healthy adults, who complete computerised tasks. Our research uses behavioural experiments, EEG, fMRI and computational models. 

To make these points more concrete, let me take you through one of our recent research projects. We were curious about the way that emotion influences the meaning people make of their experience, but research in semantic cognition has so far not address emotional experiences in great depth. To bring real-life experiences into the lab we presented research volunteers with picture that varied in their emotional tone. We selected real photographs of news events that we knew our participants cared about personally. Participants perceived emotional pictures as more similar to each other than neutral pictures. We proceeded to ask whether this is because the pictures evoked similar feelings, or because they share similar themes, such as crime and injury. We found that the themes depicted in the pictures mattered a great deal, but even when we took some steps to minimise the influence they had on similarity judgements, the similarity in feelings was still influential. This was evident in an fMRI study where the neural representation of emotional pictures were more similar to each other than the neural representations of neutral pictures. This study was part of a doctoral thesis and was published at the Journal of Neuroscience. We are now extending this project to understand how multiple facets of similarity perception contributes to recalling emotional experiences.

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