Anderson Colloquium Speaker Series

Dr. Janice Chen

John Hopkins University

May 07, 2026

Crick Conference

Studying memory for natural events across multiple timescales

What will you remember about this moment? Some details of our lives are destined to be forgotten, while others are retained in memory for seconds, minutes, hours, or even years. Information from these different eras of our memories continually influences our thoughts and actions in the present. Furthermore, events in the experiential stream are deeply connected to each other by factors such as shared features and causal influence; this network of connections guides how we engage encoding and retrieval processes during ongoing experience, as well as shapes the organization of episodic memories. I will discuss behavioral and neuroscientific studies examining how the brain implements multiple timescales of memory, and the prominent role that causal connections play in memory for real-world events.