Dr Maria Wimber, Lecturer in the School of Psychology, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) grant of €1.5 million to explore how the brain reconstructs memories.
How do we bring back to mind a memory? Are our memories truthful recounts of past experiences? Research suggests that remembering is a reconstructive process that is heavily influenced by our expectations and knowledge about the world. In her five-year ERC-funded project, Maria Wimber aims to uncover the neural mechanisms of memory reconstruction.
Her research team will use advanced brain imaging techniques to track the re-emergence of individual memories in real-time patterns of brain activity. These techniques make it possible to observe how the process of remembering unfolds, step by step, in the human brain, and how our memories changes over time when we repeatedly bring them back to mind.