Vishnu Murty, Assistant Professor, Psychology and Neuroscience and Director, Adaptive Memory Lab
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As we navigate through our worlds we are bombarded with information; far too much information to accurately store in our memories. Rather, we prioritize salient information that will help serve our future goals. This could be memories that help us obtain rewards—i.e., remembering that my partner will be more likely to agree to watch the Real Housewives with me if I do the dishes first— or memories that help us avoid punishments—i.e., remembering that driving home via Broad Street during rush hour will add 15 minutes to my commute. In this way, my lab studies how motivational and affective states drive memory selectivity and memory-guided decisions. We study these processes in a variety of learning states, including exploration, curiosity, anxiety, and threat. We have been able to support this work from federally funded grants from the National Institutes of Drug Abuse and the National Science Foundation While we mostly study these processes in healthy adults, we also use this knowledge to better understand individuals at-risk for developing psychopathologies like PTSD and psychosis, from prior and concurrent funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health and the Brain Behavioral Research Foundation. It has been particularly exciting to tackle these complex questions at Temple, where I have colleagues in Development, Education, Clinical Sciences, and Animal Neurophysiology that broaden the theoretical frameworks and techniques we use to address these questions.
This last point was especially important to me because the reason I became interested in studying memory was that there were so many ways to solve the problems. Memory as a research area can be viewed through the lens of education, brain disorders, animal models of learning, or even our everyday experiences. Critically, techniques like experimental psychology brain imaging allow us to find a common ground to integrate perspectives across all these fields. Read more here.
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FEATURED PUBLICATION
May 4, 2021
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
~Celeste Winston (Assistant Professor, Geography and Urban Studies)
"Maroon Geographies" presents a framework to guide scholarship and political organizing centered on Black placemaking and racial justice. Based on empirical research in Montgomery County, Maryland, I connect sites of past flight from slavery, known as marronage, with spaces produced through ongoing Black struggles against state and state-sanctioned racial violence. This article contributes to geographic understandings of marronage as not only a perpetual form of flight, but also as a place-based method of holding ground and constructing places of freedom.
I was inspired to conduct the research leading to this piece in response to growing popular awareness of the role that slave patrols served as precursors to modern-day police. "Maroon geographies" highlights some of the equally important, but underexplored, legacies of Black freedom struggles that have persisted from slavery until today.
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AWARD OF THE MONTH
Damien Stankiewicz, Associate Professor, Anthropology
"Comparative Ethnography of Face-to-Face and Digital Political Participation in a Southern France Town"
-National Science Foundation
As many of us are well aware, there is a growing sense that as people use more digital and social media, they are becoming differently politically informed and differently politically active. This research project examines the shifting relationship between media and politics through "on the ground" fieldwork research in a town in Southern France where, over the past decade or so, electoral support has rapidly shifted to the far-right party (Front National/Rassemblement National). In France, perhaps to greater degree than in many countries, recent electoral successes of the far-right have been attributed by journalists and scholars to the FN/RN’s innovation of digital platforms and to political support fostered through social media and user-moderated websites and forums.
Over three years, this project recently funded by NSF will combine online and offline research methods. Consisting of twelve months of intensive ethnographic research, "traditional" fieldwork will consist of participant observation and interviews with town residents to ask about how they become informed about politics, what media platforms they use, whether these have changed over time, and how they participate in politics more broadly, both locally or nationally. At the same time, digital ethnography conducted on Twitter, Telegram, and in a far-right chat room will seek to identify how political talk and styles of participation in digital contexts may differ offline (face-to-face) contexts (especially with regard to anonymity). In addition to describing shifting forms of political participation, this study explores people’s changing experiences of their national identity, and, ultimately, how national identities and belonging may be being reshaped by digital news and media. In what ways, I want to ask, is online nationalism different from offline nationalism?
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