Research Interests

Professor Zacks studies perception and cognition using behavioral experiments, functional MRI, computational modeling, and testing of neurological patients. One line of research examines how people parse the continuous stream of behavior into meaningful events, and how this affects memory and cognition. Another line examines how mental imagery contributes to reasoning about spatial relations, especially how mental representations of one's body are updated during imagery and reasoning.

Selected Publications

• Shipley, T. F. & Zacks, J. M. (Eds.). (2008). Understanding events: From perception to action. New York: Oxford University Press.

• Zacks, J. M. (2008). Neuroimaging studies of mental rotation: A meta-analysis and review. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

• Zacks, J. M., Speer, N. K., Swallow, K. M. & Maley, C. J. (2010). The brain’s cutting-room floor: segmentation of narrative cinema. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, ArtID 168.

• Swallow, K. M., Barch, D. M., Head, D., Maley, C. J., Holder, D. & Zacks, J. M. (2010). Changes in events alter how people remember recent information. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 1052-1064.

• Yu, A.B. & Zacks, J.M. (2011). The role of animacy in spatial transformations. Memory & Cognition, 38 (7), 982-993.

• Zacks, J.M., Kurby, C.A., Eisenberg, M.L., Haroutunian, N. (2011). Prediction error associated with the perceptual segmentation of naturalistic events. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 4057-4066.

Departments

Courses

• Experimental Psychology
• The Cognitive Neuroscience of Film
• Current Debates in Psychology