Charles S. Ferris, Ph.D.

Hello! My name is Dr. Charles Ferris, I am currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at William & Mary.

My background is as a cognitive neuroscientist who uses behavioral, neuroimaging, neurostimulation, and survey research techniques to study human episodic memory.

I received my Ph.D. from Emory University with Dr. Stephan Hamann, and have held postdoctoral fellowships at McGill University with Dr. Signy Sheldon and at The Ohio State University with Dr. Baldwin Way.

The general theme of my work focuses on how memory content is represented, encoded, and retrieved at the behavioral and brain systems levels. I investigate how memory content changes during memory formation, consolidation, and retrieval and the neural correlates of these processes.

In the Sheldon Memory Lab I studied the neural correlates of autobiographical episodic memory and how they change when we process conceptual compared to perceptual information.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience we demonstrated that people recruit different brain networks when making memories for stories that are more conceptual or perceptual in nature.

In this study we had participants encode stories in which the central story details were exactly the same for everyone, but these central details were surrounded by either conceptual or perceptual details. We then used fMRI to scan people's brains while they listened to the stories and formed memories. We found that when encoding the matched central details, people in the conceptual condition connected memory processing brain regions to different networks than people in the perceptual condition. This suggests that you create fundamentally different memories for the same information depending on the context in which you create those memories!

If you'd like to read more, this work was featured in an article in Scientific American.

I completed my Ph.D. in Cognition & Development at Emory University under Dr. Stephan Hamann. During that time I used overtly narrated autobiographical memory retrieval during fMRI scanning to test how the brain supports remembering at the moment to moment timescale.

In the study published in Neuropsychologia based off this work we show that:

Narrated memory retrieval activates a broadly similar network of brain regions to silent retrieval.
There are key differences in neural patterns between silent and narrated memory retrieval.

-Narrated retrieval elicits activation of language processing and speech preparation regions.

-Silent retrieval elicits stronger activation of classic memory recollection regions.

When people narrate a memory, as they naturally bring to mind object and scene words, they activate brain regions associated with visual processing of corresponding object and scene content.

A video presentation discussing this work.

It only seems fair that since I look into other people's heads that you can take a peek into my own.

As a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University with Dr. Baldwin Way, I studied the effects of adolescent marijuana use in a large scale longitudinal database of socioeconomically disadvantaged youths.

We found that early marijuana use is connected to compensatory processing in regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex during working memory tasks.

An overview of the entire lab can be viewed here on the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging Website.

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