Assistant Professor
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroimaging (Tier 2)
jpoppenk@queensu.ca
613.533.6009
345 Humphrey Hall
Queen's University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6
Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2011
M.A., University of Toronto, 2007
B.Sc. (Hons), Western University, 2005
ORCID: 0000-0002-3315-5098
What happens when we remember? Most saliently, we experience a record of our past, but we also change the memories we retrieve: for example, leading questions alter eyewitness memories, inducing possible miscarriages of justice. Furthermore, retrieved memories help us to form new ones: recollecting details from course prerequisites helps with retention of new lecture material.
I research the consequences of bringing memories to life. To this end, my studies frequently incorporate monitoring of human brain activity with fMRI. Using computational methods, I track neural evidence of memory reactivation within participants’ brains, which I relate to other processes such as memory formation, forgetting, planning for the future, and perception.
In related work, I research neural processes that underlie remembering, focusing on how and why individual differences in our brain anatomy explain differences in our memory ability, especially as they concern the hippocampus. Because of the spatial complexity of neuroanatomy, this work incorporates conceptual and methodological development in the area of neuroanatomical modeling.