Our brain has the capacity to remember a large amount of things: your best friend from elementary school in your hometown, being poked by a cactus spine in a botanic garden yesterday, a restaurant you went to on 5th avenue last month. These memories, manifested by the relationships among the underlying elements (what) embedded in spatial (where) and temporal (when) domains, are vital in guiding our future behaviors. Our brain makes, retrieves, and uses these memories through changes in neuronal activity over distributed networks comprised of many brain regions. We seek to reveal and manipulate the neural dynamics that support these complex cognitive processes. 

We use rhesus macaque as the animal model to understand how neural activity in interconnected brain networks supports memory and behavior. We are particularly interested in the hippocampal formation, retrosplenial cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and their connected regions. We believe that higher cognition is achieved through coordinated activity over large brain networks, during both active behavior and quiescent states. To this end, we have developed a paradigm in which we combine telemetric electrophysiology, wireless eye tracking, and accurate motion tracking during naturalistic behavioral tasks. We have also designed touchscreen-based tasks to probe memory encoding and consolidation.