LIla Davachi
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Students forget much of what they learn in lectures. Research in education, psychology and marketing has shown that adding visuospatial information, such as diagrams and spatial layouts, alongside words can improve memory.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Education Research
- Topics
memory consolidation
hippocampus
neural replay
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Test whether ending a STEM lecture with a visuospatial rather than a verbal summary enhances offline neural replay, the brain's reactivation of recent learning during rest, measured with fMRI right after learning.
- Determine whether visuospatial summaries improve detailed concept memory and transfer to novel contexts one week later, and whether these gains track post-learning replay between the hippocampus and the cortex.
- Test whether visuospatial summaries are later recalled with more episodic detail, making them a sturdier knowledge representation onto which new learning content can be added.
More about the research
Why this works, especially for learning STEM concepts, is not well understood. Knowing the mechanism could help instructors design lessons that are remembered longer.
Why it matters
The findings could guide how STEM lectures, slides and online lessons are designed and structured. For example, they could show whether ending a lesson with a visual summary helps students retain and apply concepts. The work could also clarify how memories are strengthened after learning, which may point to strategies that boost memory and cognition across age groups.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Genevieve Albouy
University of Utah, UT·Neuroscience
Test whether temporal interference stimulation (TIS), a non-invasive way to stimulate deep brain regions, applied to the hippocampus enhances offline motor sequence learning in young healthy adults, compared with sham stimulation.
Erin Wamsley
Furman University, SC·Neuroscience
Test whether memories are reactivated and strengthened during seconds-long periods of waking rest, as they are during sleep, using EEG combined with measures of pupil size, reported thoughts and behavior.
Anson Kairys
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Compare subjective (self-reported) and objective (test-based) cognitive function between people with fibromyalgia and healthy controls, and assess how co-occurring symptoms shape the relationship between the two.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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