Jordan Poppenk
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
B.Sc. (Hons), Western University, 2005
M.A., University of Toronto, 2007
Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2011
Research Interests
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.
Selected Publications
Poppenk, J., McIntosh, A.R., & Moscovitch, M. (in press). fMRI evidence of equivalent neural suppression by repetition and prior knowledge. Neuropsychologia.
Poppenk, J., & Norman, K.A. (2014). Briefly cuing memories leads to suppression of their neural representations. Journal of Neuroscience, 34, 8010-8020.
Poppenk, J., Evensmoen, H., Nadel, L., & Moscovitch, M. (2013). Long-axis specialization in the human hippocampus. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 230-40.
Poppenk, J., & Moscovitch, M. (2011). A hippocampal marker of recollection memory ability among healthy young adults: contributions of posterior and anterior segments. Neuron, 6, 931-937.
Poppenk, J., Köhler, S., & Moscovitch, M. (2010). Revisiting the novelty effect: When familiarity, not novelty, enhances memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 36, 1321-1330