Adam Curtis
PhD Student

Research

Overview

The Temporal Dynamics of Schema-dependent Memory Processing.

Projects

Research suggests that experiences that either strongly affirm or strongly contradict our pre-existing schematic knowledge tend to be better remembered than events that are unrelated to such knowledge. Neurocognitive models propose that these ‘schema-effects’ in memory are mediated by interactions between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and medial temporal lobes (MTL). However, the precise nature of these interactions in the generation of schema-effects has yet to be resolved. This project aims to address this issue by combining magnetoencephalography (MEG) with multivariate decoding techniques and measures of functional connectivity to study the temporal dynamics of the PFC-MTL circuit during the processing of schema-relevant information.

Research group(s)

• York Episodic Memory Lab
• Sleep, Language and Memory (SLAM) Lab.

Collaborators

• Dr Aidan Horner – University of York (PhD supervisor)
• Professor Maria Wimber – University of Glasgow (collaborator)
• Professor Gareth Gaskell – University of York (collaborator)

Publications

Selected publications

• Mak, M. H., Curtis, A. J., Rodd, J. M., & Gaskell, M. G. (2022). Episodic memory and sleep are involved in the maintenance of context-specific lexical information. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4dscu.
• Curtis, A. J., Mak, M. H. C., Chen, S., Rodd, J. M., & Gaskell, M. G. (2022). Word-meaning priming extends beyond homonyms. Cognition, 226, 105175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105175.
• Civile, C., Waguri, E., Quaglia, S., Wooster, B., Curtis, A., McLaren, R., Lavric, A., & McLaren, I. P. L. (2020). Testing the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the face inversion effect and the N170 event-related potentials (ERPs) component. Neuropsychologia, 143, 107470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107470.