Janice Chen

About

Janice Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on understanding how the brain constructs and retrieves memories of complex real-world episodes. She employs realistic stimuli such as movies and narratives, along with behaviors like spoken recall, which contain rich natural semantics and unfold continuously across multiple timescales. Using temporal and spatial pattern analysis methods combined with functional brain imaging data, her work investigates how mnemonic and sensory systems dynamically operate together to create the present moment. Chen's research addresses the convergence of sensory input from the outside world and elements from past experiences, exploring how memories triggered by sensory stimuli influence ongoing perception and behavior across multiple timescales, from moments to days prior. She emphasizes the importance of studying real memory with real stimuli, arguing that traditional experimental approaches that trade realism for control may overlook the richness and complexity inherent in naturalistic memory processes.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Natural Language Processing
• Political Science
• Cognitive psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Evolutionary biology
• Biology

Selected publications

• The “Narratives” fMRI dataset for evaluating models of naturalistic language comprehension

  Scientific Data · 2021 · 153 citations

  The "Narratives" collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardiz…

  DOI

• Predicting memory from the network structure of naturalistic events

  Nature Communications · 2022 · 98 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  When we remember events, we often do not only recall individual events, but also the connections between them. However, extant research has focused on how humans segment and remember discrete events from continuous input, with far less attention given to how the structure of connections between events impacts memory. Here we conduct a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in which participants watch and recall a series of realistic audiovisual narratives. By transforming narratives into ne…

  DOI

• Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 86 citations

  People tend to interpret political information in a manner that confirms their prior beliefs, a cognitive bias that contributes to rising political polarization. In this study, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging with semantic content analyses to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real-world political content. We scanned American participants with conservative-leaning or liberal-leaning immigration attitudes while they watched news clips, campa…

  DOI

• Context-dependent neocentromere activity in synthetic yeast chromosome VIII

  Cell Genomics · 2023-11-01 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access

  Pioneering advances in genome engineering, and specifically in genome writing, have revolutionized the field of synthetic biology, propelling us toward the creation of synthetic genomes. The Sc2.0 project aims to build the first fully synthetic eukaryotic organism by assembling the genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. With the completion of synthetic chromosome VIII (synVIII) described here, this goal is within reach. In addition to writing the yeast genome, we sought to manipulate an essential f…

  PublisherDOI

• The causal structure and computational value of narratives

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2024-05-10 · 16 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Effects of experience on shared information across brains: Insights from blindness

  NSF · $165k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Uri Hasson

  Neuroscience Institute

  46 shared

• Mariam Aly

  Columbia University

  20 shared

• Nicholas B. Turk‐Browne

  Yale University

  20 shared

• Kenneth A. Norman

  Princeton University

  20 shared

• Christopher J. Honey

  Johns Hopkins University

  15 shared

• Hongmi Lee

  14 shared

• Christopher Baldassano

  14 shared

• Erez Simony

  Holon Institute of Technology

  12 shared

Labs

• Janice Chen LabPI

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Richard Huganirh-210
• Michela Gallagherh-104
• Patricia Janakh-88