Charles S. Ferris, Ph.D.

Hello! My name is Dr. Charles Ferris, I am a cognitive neuroscientist who uses behavioral, neuroimaging, and neurostimulation techniques to study human episodic memory.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at McGill University with Dr. Signy Sheldon. In the Sheldon Memory Lab I study the neural correlates of autobiographical episodic memory. My work focuses on how memory content is represented, how that content changes during memory formation and retrieval, and how the neural correlates of these processes change depending on encoding and retrieval factors such as content and context.

Previously, I studied at Emory University with Dr. Stephan Hamann as a graduate student, during that time I used overtly narrated autobiographical memory retrieval in the scanner to test how your brain supports remembering internally to yourself compared to when you share that memory out loud in real time.

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

Narrated memory retrieval activates a similar network of brain regions to silent retrieval
There are key differences in neural pattern between memory retrieval types. Narrated retrieval elicits activation of language processing and speech preparation regions. Silent retrieval elicits stronger activation of some classic memory recollection regions.
When people narrate a memory, when they bring to mind object and scene words they activate brain regions associated with visual processing of corresponding object and scene content.

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

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