Sarah Sweigart

Research Description

Sarah’s research focuses on the mechanisms of decision-making, particularly how we learn new information, integrate it into our existing knowledge framework and flexibly generalize it to solve new problems. She is particularly interested in studying whether cognitive maps, known to represent spatial relationships for navigation, may also flexibly encode discrete, value-based decisions in the entorhinal cortex (ERC) and hippocampus (HC). Her research questions have broader impacts for understanding how information is organized to make decisions and its implications for learning and memory deficits and may prove to be a sensitive method for detecting early cognitive deficits in disorders that affect the HC-ERC system, such as Alzheimer’s Disease. Her behavioral results have suggested that during inferencing people’s decisions reflect context-dependent cognitive map distance measures that reflect the values of different entities as defined by a cognitive map. She is following her behavioral work with fMRI data collection and advanced neuroimaging techniques such as representational similarity analysis to determine how representations of cognitive maps change by context and affect behavior. Additionally, with collaboration from Dr. Randall O’Reilly, Sarah is using biologically plausible computational modeling to develop realistic models for cognitive map formation and utilization.