Charles S. Ferris, Ph.D.

Hello! My name is Dr. Charles Ferris, I am a cognitive neuroscientist who uses behavioral, neuroimaging, neurostimulation, and survey research techniques to study human episodic memory.

I have just recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology at McGill University with Dr. Signy Sheldon. In the Sheldon Memory Lab I studied the neural correlates of autobiographical episodic memory.

The general theme of my work focuses on how memory content is represented, encoded, and retrieved at the behavioral and brain systems levels. I investigate how memory content changes during memory formation, consolidation, and retrieval and the neural correlates of these processes.

Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in Cognition & Development at Emory University under Dr. Stephan Hamann. During that time I used overtly narrated autobiographical memory retrieval during fMRI scanning to test how the brain supports remembering at the moment to moment timescale.

In the study published in Neuropsychologia based off this work we show that:

Narrated memory retrieval activates a broadly similar network of brain regions to silent retrieval.
There are key differences in neural patterns between silent and narrated memory retrieval.

-Narrated retrieval elicits activation of language processing and speech preparation regions.

-Silent retrieval elicits stronger activation of classic memory recollection regions.

When people narrate a memory, as they naturally bring to mind object and scene words, they activate brain regions associated with visual processing of corresponding object and scene content.

A video presentation discussing this work.

It only seems fair that since I look into other people's heads that you can take a peek into my own.

As a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University with Dr. Baldwin Way, I studied the effects of adolescent marijuana use in a large scale longitudinal database of socioeconomically disadvantaged youths.

We found that early marijuana use is connected to compensatory processing in regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex during working memory tasks.

An overview of the entire lab can be viewed here on the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging Website.

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