
Christopher R MadanUniversity of Nottingham | Notts · School of Psychology
Christopher R Madan
PhD
Accepting PhD students (email if interested in more details)
About
216
Publications
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Introduction
I study memory using a combination of cognitive psychology, neuroimaging, and computational modeling methods. I am particularly interested in what factors makes some experiences more memorable than others (such as emotion, reward, and motor processing) and how these influences can manifest in future behavior, such as decision making. I also specialize in characterizing inter-individual differences in brain morphology, particularly with respect to aging, dementia, and cognitive abilities.
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - present
September 2014 - August 2017
October 2011 - July 2012
Publications
Publications (216)
What makes some words more memorable than others? Words can vary in many dimensions, and a variety of lexical, semantic, and affective properties have previously been associated with variability in recall performance. Free recall data were used from 147 participants across 20 experimental sessions from the Penn Electrophysiology of Encoding and Ret...
Fractal dimensionality (FD) measures the complexity within the folds and ridges of cortical and subcortical structures. We tested the degree that FD might provide a new perspective on the atrophy-compensation hypothesis: age or disease-related atrophy causes a compensatory neural response in the form of increased brain activity in the prefrontal co...
We have used the magnetisation transfer (MT) MRI measure as a primary measure of myelination in both the grey matter (GM) of the 78 cortical automated anatomical labelling (AAL) regions of the brain, and the underlying white matter in each region, in a cohort of healthy adults (aged 19 to 62 years old). The results revealed a significant quadratic...
Cortical gyrification has been found to decrease due to aging, but thus far this has only been examined in cross‐sectional samples. Interestingly, the topography of these age‐related differences in gyrification follows a distinct gradient along the cortex relative to age effects on cortical thickness, likely suggesting a different underlying neurob...
Both memory and decision processes are strongly influenced by the context in which they occur. Here we examined how fluid these context effects are and whether transient background contexts can influence risky choice in experience-based decision making. We created two separate background contexts within an experimental session by presenting distinc...
Subjective memory evaluation is important for assessing memory abilities and complaints, alongside objective measures. In both research and clinical settings, questionnaires are used to examine memory beliefs and knowledge, perceived memory ability, and memory complaints. Although they provide a structured measure of self-reported memory, there is...
The use of interleaving as a form of contextual variation can enhance, impair, or have no effect on memory. We hypothesise that this variability is due to task demands interacting with the amount of available cognitive resources an individual can mobilise. Using two memory interleaving task paradigms, desirable difficulties and the complex span, we...
Having a parent with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias confers a risk for developing these types of neurocognitive disorders in old age, but the mechanisms underlying this risk are understudied. Although the hippocampus is often one of the earliest brain regions to undergo change in the AD process, we do not know how early in the lifes...
In recent years, the scientific community has called for improvements in the credibility, robustness, and reproducibility of research, characterized by higher standards of scientific evidence, increased interest in open practices, and promotion of transparency. While progress has been positive, there is a lack of consideration about how this approa...
How does imagining future events – whether positive or negative – influence our choices in the present? Prior work has shown the simulation of hypothetical future events, dubbed episodic future thinking, can alter the propensity to engage in delay discounting (the tendency to devalue future rewards) and does so in a valence specific manner. Some re...
Interleaving is an evidence-based, learning-science strategy that is relevant to the planning and implementation of continuing professional development (CPD). Mixing related but different areas of study forces the brain to reconcile the relationship between the areas while understanding each area well. By doing so, interleaving increases the likeli...
Background
Connectome analysis of neuroimaging data is a rapidly expanding field that offers the potential to diagnose, characterize, and predict neurological disease. Animal models provide insight into biological mechanisms that underpin disease, but connectivity approaches are currently lagging in the rodent.
Methods
We present a pipeline adapte...
Psychological theory and research suggest that religious individuals could have differences in the appraisal of immoral behaviors and cognitions compared to non-religious individuals. This effect could occur due to adherence to prescriptive and inviolate deontic religious-moral rules and socio-evolutionary factors, such as increased autonomic nervo...
In the original version of this paper, the title was incorrect.
Fractal geometry has recently been proposed as a useful tool for characterizing the complexity of the brain cortex, which is likely to derive from the recurrence of sulci‐gyri convolution patterns. The index used to describe the cortical complexity is called Fractal Dimensionality (FD) and was employed by different research exploring the neurobiolo...
Associative learning is the process whereby humans and other animals learn the predictive relationship between cues in their environment. This process underlies simple forms of learning from rewards, such as classical and operant conditioning. In this chapter, we introduce the basics of associative learning and discuss the role that memory processe...
Emotion can color what we perceive and subsequently remember in myriad ways. Indeed, it is well established that emotion enhances some aspects of memory, while impairing others. For example, a number of recent episodic memory studies show that emotion—particularly negative emotion—weakens associative memory, including item-item associations. Other...
Objectives
To use a case review approach for investigating the types of cognitive error identifiable following a complicated patient admission with a multisystem disorder in an acute care setting where diagnosis was difficult and delayed.
Methods
A case notes review was undertaken to explore the cognitive factors associated with diagnostic error i...
The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emot...
Over the last two decades, nearly one hundred studies have been published examining reward influences on memory. Implementations of reward-value procedures have varied markedly, as have other study characteristics, including images vs. words, intentional vs. incidental memory encoding, and recall vs. recognition tests. As such, the resulting state...
The thickness and surface area of cortex are genetically distinct aspects of brain structure, and may be affected differently by age. However, their potential to differentially predict age and cognitive abilities has been largely overlooked, likely because they are typically aggregated into the commonly used measure of volume . In a large sample of...
In this manuscript we review a seminal debate related to subliminality and concerning the relationship of consciousness, unconsciousness, and perception. We present the methodological implementations that contemporary psychology introduced to explore this relationship, such as the application of unbiased self-report metrics and Bayesian analyses fo...
A wealth of research suggests that emotion enhances memory. Yet, this enhancement is not uniform. While some theories posit that emotion enhances memory for sensory/perceptual information, such an enhancement has not been observed in mnemonic detail production. However, a focus on remote events (often more semanticized) may be masking an effect. Fo...
Caffeine is a widely used nootropic drug, but its effects on memory in healthy participants have not been sufficiently evaluated. Here we review evidence of the effects of caffeine on different types of memory, and the associated drug, experimental, and demographical factors. There is limited evidence that caffeine affects performance in memory tas...
Studies have shown that the cerebellar vermis is involved in the perception of motion. However, it is unclear how the cerebellum influences motion perception. tDCS is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that can reduce (through cathodal stimulation) or increase neuronal excitability (through anodal stimulation). To explore the nature of the...
Mu oscillations (8–13 Hz), recorded over the human motor cortex, have been shown to consistently suppress during both the imagination and performance of movements; however, its functional significance in the imagery process is currently unclear. Here we examined human electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillations in the context of motor imagery perfor...
Previous research evidenced alterations of different cortical parameters in patients with acute Anorexia Nervosa (AN), but no study to date investigated the morphology of individual sulci and their relationship with other structural indices. Our study aims at exploring the depth and width of 16 major cortical sulci in AN at different stages of the...
When positive or negative events occur in a context, memory can be reflected in how positively or negatively we judge that context, and also by whether, upon later remembering that emotional event, we can bring to mind the specific context in which it occurred. We examined each of these forms of associative memory, comparing performance when positi...
Becoming a successful academic and securing a principal investigator (PI) position at a research-intensive university requires many distinct skills. Beyond some form of technical skills and domain-specific knowledge, some of these skills include time management, scientific writing, public speaking, and project management. Training prior to the PI p...
The events of our lives unfold across time. When remembering these events, we often reference information about when they occurred and their sequential unfolding. How does emotion affect our ability to reconstruct in memory the elements of an event in the correct temporal order? The present study explored this question using naturalistic stimuli. H...
When deciding between different courses of action, both the potential outcomes and the costs of making a choice should be considered. To date, most studies of risk-sensitive choice have focused on the probability of different reward amounts. Here we studied choice between options that varied in the riskiness of the effort (number of responses) requ...
Our memories can differ in quality from one event to the next, and emotion is one important explanatory factor. Still, the manner in which emotion impacts episodic memory is complex: Whereas emotion enhances some aspects of episodic memory—particularly central aspects—it dampens memory for peripheral/contextual information. Extending previous work,...
In this crowdsourced initiative, independent analysts used the same dataset to test two hypotheses regarding the effects of scientists' gender and professional status on verbosity during group meetings. Not only the analytic approach but also the operationalizations of key variables were left unconstrained and up to individual analysts. For instanc...
A better understanding of early brain changes that precede loss of independence in diseases like Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical for development of disease-modifying therapies. Quantitative MRI, such as T2 relaxometry, can identify microstructural changes relevant to early stages of pathology. Recent evidence suggests heterogeneity of T2 may b...
Caffeine is a widely used nootropic drug, but its effects on memory in healthy participants have not been sufficiently evaluated. Here we review evidence of the effects of caffeine on different types of memory, and the associated drug, experimental, and demographical factors. There is limited evidence that caffeine affects performance in memory tas...
We are now in a time of readily available brain imaging data. Not only are researchers now sharing data more than ever before, but additionally large-scale data collecting initiatives are underway with the vision that many future researchers will use the data for secondary analyses. Here I provide an overview of available datasets and some example...
Functional changes in the aging human brain have been previously reported using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Earlier resting-state fMRI studies revealed an age-associated weakening of intra-system functional connectivity (FC) and age-associated strengthening of inter-system FC. However, the majority of such FC studies did not inves...
Both memory and choice are influenced by context: Memory is enhanced when encoding and retrieval contexts match, and choice is swayed by available options. Here, we assessed how context influences risky choice in an experience-based task in two main experiments (119 and 98 participants retained, respectively) and two additional experiments reported...
How does imagining future events – whether positive or negative – influence our choices in the present? Prior work has shown the simulation of hypothetical future events, dubbed episodic future thinking, can alter the propensity to engage in delay discounting (the tendency to devalue future rewards) and does so in a valence specific manner. Some re...
How does imagining future events – whether positive or negative – influence our choices in the present? Prior work has shown the simulation of hypothetical future events, dubbed episodic future thinking, can alter the propensity to engage in delay discounting (the tendency to devalue future rewards) and does so in a valence specific manner. Some re...
Retrieval practice is an evidence-based, science of learning strategy that is relevant to the planning and implementation of continuing professional development (CPD). Retrieval practice requires one to examine long-term memory to work with priority information again in working memory. Retrieval practice improves learning in two ways. It improves m...
The brain processes underlying impairing effects of emotional arousal on associative memory were previously attributed to two dissociable routes using high-resolution fMRI of the MTL (Madan et al. 2017). Extrahippocampal MTL regions supporting associative encoding of neutral pairs suggested unitization; conversely, associative encoding of negative...
Studies have shown that the cerebellar vermis is involved in the perception of motion. However, it is unclear how the cerebellum influences motion perception. tDCS is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that can reduce (through cathodal stimulation) or increase neuronal excitability (through anodal stimulation). To explore the nature of the...
This manuscript is a pre-print and may differ from the accepted/published version. 2 Abstract Psychological theory and research suggest that religious individuals could have differences in the appraisal of immoral behaviors and cognitions compared to non-religious individuals. This effect could occur due to adherence to prescriptive and inviolate d...
When measuring memory performance for emotional and neutral stimuli many studies are confounded by not controlling for differential semantic relatedness between stimulus sets. This could lead to the misattribution of the cause of an emotional enhancement of memory effect (EEM), because differential semantic relatedness also contributes to the EEM....
Memory impairment following an acquired brain injury can negatively impact daily living, quality of life, and progression to dementia—but can be reduced by memory rehabilitation. Here we review the literature on three approaches for memory rehabilitation and their associated strategies: (1) the restorative approach, aimed at a return to pre-morbid...
Learning to play a musical instrument involves mapping visual + auditory cues to motor movements and anticipating transitions. Inspired by the serial reaction time task and artificial grammar learning, we investigated explicit and implicit knowledge of statistical learning in a sensorimotor task. Using a between-subjects design with four groups, on...
Gray matter volume for cortical, subcortical, and ventricles all vary with age. However, these volumetric changes do not happen on their own, there are also age-related changes in cortical folding and other measures of brain shape. Fractal dimensionality has emerged as a more sensitive measure of brain structure, capturing both volumetric and shape...
Mounting evidence indicates issues with low adherence to existing consensus-based guidelines for conducting systematic reviews (SRs), meaning that SRs can be subject to selective or misreporting practices. This problem arises in part from scarce guidance for reproducible reporting practices. This is compounded by the fact that existing guidelines a...
Mounting evidence indicates issues with low adherence to existing consensus-based guidelines for conducting systematic reviews (SRs), meaning that SRs can be subject to selective or misreporting practices. This problem arises in part from scarce guidance for reproducible reporting practices. This is compounded by the fact that existing guidelines a...
When people make risky decisions based on past experience, they must rely on memory. The nature of the memory representations that support these decisions is not yet well understood. A key question concerns the extent to which people recall specific past episodes or whether they have learned a more abstract rule from their past experience. To addre...
Rapid advances in image processing capabilities have been seen across many domains, fostered by the application of machine learning algorithms to "big-data". However, within the realm of medical image analysis, advances have been curtailed, in part, due to the limited availability of large-scale, well-annotated datasets. One of the main reasons for...
Rapid advances in image processing capabilities have been seen across many domains, fostered by the application of machine learning algorithms to "big-data". However, within the realm of medical image analysis, advances have been curtailed, in part, due to the limited availability of large-scale, well-annotated datasets. One of the main reasons for...
Introduction
Functional changes in the aging human brain have been previously reported using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Earlier resting-state fMRI studies revealed an age-associated weakening of intra-system functional connectivity (FC) and age-associated strengthening of inter-system FC. However, the majority of such FC studies...
In launching this Research Topic, our objective was to capture contemporary perspectives on the conceptualization and measurement of human-nature interactions, and advance future research perspectives. The ubiquitous nature of the challenge is exemplified by a diverse and expansive list of countries of our contributors, which ranges among 15 differ...
Connectome analysis of neuroimaging data is a rapidly expanding field to identify disease specific biomarkers. Structural diffusion MRI connectivity has been useful in individuals with radiological features of small vessel disease, such as white matter hyperintensities. Global efficiency, a network metric calculated from the structural connectome,...
A better understanding of early brain changes that precede loss of independence in diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is critical for development of disease-modifying therapies. Quantitative MRI, such as T2 relaxometry, can identify microstructural changes relevant to early stages of pathology. Recent evidence suggests heterogeneity of T2 may b...
BACKGROUND
In recent years there has been a shift from traditional Halstedian methods toward more simulation-based medical education (SBME) for developing surgical skills. Questions remain about the role and value of SBME, although feedback and engagement in repetitive practice have been associated with positive learning outcomes. Regardless of app...
Distributed practice is an evidence-based, learning-science strategy that is relevant to the planning and implementation of continuing professional development (CPD). Spacing-out study or practice over time allows the brain multiple opportunities to process new and complex information in an efficient way, thus increasing the likelihood of mastery a...
Motor imagery, or our ability to imagine movement without actually engaging in the action, has been an increasingly popular tool in rehabilitation settings. Understanding its neural underpinning is crucial for further development of new interventions. Using scalp electroencephalography (EEG), many studies have shown that mu oscillations (8-13 Hz),...
The definition of episodic memory, as proposed by Tulving, includes a requirement of conscious recall. As we are unable to assess this aspect of memory in nonhuman animals, many researchers have referred to demonstrations of what would otherwise be considered episodic memory as "episodic-like memory." Here the definition of episodic memory is recon...
A wealth of research suggests that emotion enhances memory. Yet, the relationship between emotion and memory is complex and nuanced, as emotion does not uniformly enhance all aspects of memory. The goal of the present study was to examine the effects of emotion on real- world, autobiographical memories (AM), with a specific focus on elucidating the...
Video games are sometimes used as environments to evaluate AI agents’ ability to develop and execute complex action sequences to maximize a defined reward. However, humans cannot match the fine precision of the timed actions of AI agents; in games such as StarCraft, build orders take the place of chess opening gambits. However, unlike strategy game...
Autobiographical memory studies conducted with narrative methods are onerous, requiring significant resources in time and labor. We have created a semi-automated process that allows autobiographical transcribing and scoring methods to be streamlined. Our paper focuses on the Autobiographical Interview (AI; Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, & Moscovitc...
Context
Changes to surgical training programmes in the UK has led to a reduction in theatre time for trainees, and an increasing reliance on simulation to provide procedural experience. Whilst simulation offers opportunity for repetitive practice, the effectiveness of simulation as an educational intervention for developing procedural surgical skil...
Our memories can differ in quality from one event to the next and emotion is one important explanatory factor. Still, the manner in which emotion impacts episodic memory is complex: Whereas emotion enhances some aspects of an episodic memory—particularly the central aspects—it dampens memory for non-central information, such as spatial context. Ext...
We are now in a time of readily available brain imaging data. Not only are researchers now sharing data more than ever before, but additionally large-scale data collecting initiatives are underway with the vision that many future researchers will use the data for secondary analyses. Here I provide an overview of available datasets and some example...
On-going, large-scale neuroimaging initiatives have produced many MRI datasets with hundreds, even thousands, of individual participants and scans. These databases can aid in uncovering neurobiological causes and correlates of poor mental health, disease pathology, and many other important factors. While volumetric quantification of brain structure...
Video games are sometimes used as environments to evaluate AI agents' ability to develop and execute complex action sequences to maximize a defined reward. However, humans cannot match the fine precision of timed actions of AI agents--in games such as StarCraft, build orders take the place of chess opening gambits. However, unlike strategy games, s...