Albert Lee

We are interested in how animals form, store, and recall memories of places they've been to and the things they've experienced there. A related topic we study is how animals are able to imagine possible future scenarios of what might happen in those places - an ability that can facilitate goal-directed planning and behavior. We focus on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in mice and rats, as these brain regions are known to be critical for spatial learning, memory, and imagination in animals, including in humans. We use extracellular recording, imaging, intracellular recording, real-time processing, and related methods to monitor and manipulate single neurons and large-scale neural activity across the brain during behavior. We also use real-time brain-machine interfaces to investigate memory retrieval, imagination, and other internally driven cognitive processes. We employ these methods in freely behaving animals and animals fixed in place while behaving in virtual spaces, which allows precise control of the environment with which the animals interact.