Chantal Stern

About

Chantal Stern is a Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Boston University. She holds a DPhil from Oxford University, England. Her laboratory focuses on mapping the human brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The primary goal of her research is to study how the normal brain encodes, stores, and recognizes visual, spatial, and verbal information. In addition to investigating normal short-term and long-term memory processes, her work extends to studying normal aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and HIV-related dementia through behavioral testing and fMRI. Graduate students in her Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory conduct research within the psychology department at Boston University and at the Massachusetts General Hospital NMR center.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive psychology
• Medicine
• Developmental psychology
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Gated transformations from egocentric to allocentric reference frames involving retrosplenial cortex, entorhinal cortex, and hippocampus

  Hippocampus · 2023 · 65 citations

  This paper reviews the recent experimental finding that neurons in behaving rodents show egocentric coding of the environment in a number of structures associated with the hippocampus. Many animals generating behavior on the basis of sensory input must deal with the transformation of coordinates from the egocentric position of sensory input relative to the animal, into an allocentric framework concerning the position of multiple goals and objects relative to each other in the environment. Neuron…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Theta oscillations support active exploration in human spatial navigation

  NeuroImage · 2022 · 58 citations

  Active navigation seems to yield better spatial knowledge than passive navigation, but it is unclear how active decision-making influences learning and memory. Here, we examined the contributions of theta oscillations to memory-related exploration while testing theories about how they contribute to active learning. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we tested individuals on a maze-learning task in which they made discrete decisions about where to explore at each choice point in the maze. Half t…

  PublisherDOI

• Improving fitness increases dentate gyrus/CA3 volume in the hippocampal head and enhances memory in young adults

  Hippocampus · 2019-10-07 · 57 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Converging evidence suggests a relationship between aerobic exercise and hippocampal neuroplasticity that interactively impacts hippocampally dependent memory. The majority of human studies have focused on the potential for exercise to reduce brain atrophy and attenuate cognitive decline in older adults, whereas animal studies often center on exercise‐induced neurogenesis and hippocampal plasticity in the dentate gyrus (DG) of young adult animals. In the present study, initially sedenta…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Structural Differences in Hippocampal and Entorhinal Gray Matter Volume Support Individual Differences in First Person Navigational Ability

  Neuroscience · 2018-04-16 · 31 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A network model of behavioural performance in a rule learning task

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2018-02-26 · 21 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Humans demonstrate differences in performance on cognitive rule learning tasks which could involve differences in properties of neural circuits. An example model is presented to show how gating of the spread of neural activity could underlie rule learning and the generalization of rules to previously unseen stimuli. This model uses the activity of gating units to regulate the pattern of connectivity between neurons responding to sensory input and subsequent gating units or output units. This mod…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01NS040239

  NIH · $1.5M · 2005

• NIH Grant P50MH071702

  NIH · $17.6M · 2011

• NIH Grant P50MH094263

  NIH · $17.3M · 2017

Frequent coauthors

• Robert S. Ross

  National Institute for Health Research

  119 shared

• Michael E. Hasselmo

  81 shared

• Karin Schön

  Center for Systems Biology

  72 shared

• Kim Celone

  Boston University

  63 shared

• Thackery I. Brown

  60 shared

• Yakeel T. Quiroz

  Harvard University

  60 shared

• Francisco Lopera

  57 shared

• Elizabeth R. Chrastil

  University of California, Irvine

  57 shared

Labs

• Cognitive Neuroimaging LaboratoryPI

Education

• Other

  Oxford University

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Michael Ottoh-111
• Rosemary Toomeyh-60