Jesse Rissman

Dr. Jesse Rissman’s research explores the interplay of attention and memory, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize the neural circuits that support these fundamental cognitive processes. Projects in his laboratory seek to elucidate how moment-to-moment changes in a person’s behavioral goals can serve to sculpt neural activity within sensory cortices and the medial temporal lobe memory system, exerting a profound influence over what information gets encoded into, maintained in, or retrieved from memory. His work also examines how the act of bringing past experiences back to mind, via the neural reactivation of specific event details, can facilitate the generation of memory-based predictions that guide future behavior. Rather than simply using fMRI as tool to isolate the functional contributions of individual brain regions, his research employs innovative analytical tools to characterize the dynamic interactions between brain regions, as well as to decode the informational content of distributed brain activity patterns.

Bio:
Jesse Rissman joined the UCLA faculty in 2011 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.