Marvin Chun , Ph.D.

Imaging the Future

One of the most fascinating aspects of cognition is the ability to simulate the future for planning and decision-making. Understanding such prospective cognition can be facilitated with functional brain imaging data that reveal relevant cognitive activity even before people exhibit measurable behaviors. I will discuss how people learn to anticipate predictable events, and how they may simulate future outcomes to make decisions. This ability to anticipate future events relies heavily on traditional associative learning and memory mechanisms. I will also show how brain-imaging data can be used to predict how well subjects may perform an upcoming task. An exciting agenda for future brain imaging research is to understand the future.