Charan Ranganath
· ProfessorUniversity of California, Davis · Neurology
Active 1996–2026
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About
Charan Ranganath is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, with additional affiliations including the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience and the Center for Mind and Brain. He is also the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at UC Davis. His research involves the use of functional neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and behavioral methods to study the neural basis of human memory and executive control. His work focuses on the neurocognitive structure of human memory, particularly the relationship between short-term (working) memory and long-term memory, investigating how overlapping regions of the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobes support these memory types. He also explores the role of the prefrontal cortex in controlling and evaluating memory information and collaborates on research examining the roles of medial temporal lobe regions in recognition memory processes. Ranganath has served as an editor for prominent neuroscience journals and has consulted for government and private funding agencies, contributing to the advancement of cognitive neuroscience.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Cognitive psychology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Physics
- Audiology
- Biology
- Psychiatry
- Cognitive science
Selected publications
Map Making: Constructing, Combining, and Inferring on Abstract Cognitive Maps
Neuron · 2020 · 276 citations
Structured Event Memory: A neuro-symbolic model of event cognition.
Psychological Review · 2020 · 172 citations
(SEM) model of event cognition, which accounts for human abilities in event segmentation, memory, and generalization. SEM is derived from a probabilistic generative model of event dynamics defined over structured symbolic scenes. By embedding symbolic scene representations in a vector space and parametrizing the scene dynamics in this continuous space, SEM combines the advantages of structured and neural network approaches to high-level cognition. Using probabilistic reasoning over this generati…
Aging alters neural activity at event boundaries in the hippocampus and Posterior Medial network
Nature Communications · 2020 · 133 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingRecent research has highlighted a role for the hippocampus and a Posterior Medial cortical network in signaling event boundaries. However, little is known about whether or how these neural processes change over the course of healthy aging. Here, 546 cognitively normal participants 18-88 years old viewed a short movie while brain activity was measured using fMRI. The hippocampus and regions of the Posterior Medial network show increased activity at event boundaries, but these boundary-evoked resp…
Neuron · 2023-11-08 · 47 citations
articleSenior authorNeuropsychopharmacology · 2020 · 44 citations
Recent grants
NIH · $3.1M · 2015
Naturalistic Event Representation as a Novel Biomarker of Preclinical Alzheimer's Disease
NIH · $314k · 2019–2022
NIH · $2.4M · 2014
Frequent coauthors
- 57 shared
Andrew P. Yonelinas
University of California, Davis
- 37 shared
J. Daniel Ragland
University of California, Davis
- 29 shared
Matthias J. Gruber
Cardiff University
- 28 shared
Zachariah M. Reagh
Washington University in St. Louis
- 25 shared
Laura A. Libby
University of California, Davis
- 18 shared
Tara A. Niendam
Columbia University
- 18 shared
Xiaonan L. Liu
Chinese University of Hong Kong
- 17 shared
Michael X Cohen
Radboud University Nijmegen
Awards & honors
- Guggenheim Fellowship
- Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship at the University of…
- Laird Cermak Award from the Memory Disorders Research Societ…
- Samuel Sutton Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributio…
- Chancellor’s Fellow award from UC Davis
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