Our Research

At the Preston Lab, we use a combination of behavioral and brain imaging techniques to explore how we form new memories, how we remember past experiences, and how our memory for the past influences what we learn in the present.

About Our Research Participate

Kids, Teens & Parents

Are you Interested in how your brain works? We are actively recruiting kids and teens for our studies of memory development  to learn more about how the brain changes as we grow up and how children and adolescents remember new things.

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Latest Publications

From studies of memory development to how memories influence our decisions, there is a lot going on at the Preston Lab. View our scientific papers:

Asynchronous development of memory integration and differentiation influences temporal memory organization

Coughlin, C.*, Pudhiyidath, A.*, Roome, H. E., Varga, N. L., Nguyen, K. V., & Preston, A. R

Developmental Science, 00, e13437

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Representations of temporal community structure in hippocampus and precuneus predict inductive reasoning decisions.

Pudhiyidath P*, Morton NW*, Viveros Duran R, Schapiro AC, Momennejad I, Hinojosa-Rowland DM, Molitor RJ, Preston AR

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 34(10) 1736-1760

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Spatial preposition use predicts children’s spatial map formation

Kim Nguyen, Hannah Roome, Christine Coughlin, Katherine Sherrill, Alison Preston

PsyArXiv

Schema, Inference, and Memory

Nicole L. Varga, Neal W. Morton, Alison R. Preston

Oxford Handbook of Human Memory

About Our Lab

The Preston Lab is a cognitive neuroscience lab made up of researchers and students at The University of Texas at Austin. Led by Alison R. Preston, Ph.D., the lab studies how kids, adolescents, and adults acquire and retain knowledge.

Meet Our Team

News & Events

Undergraduate Research Assistant Application

Undergraduate Research Assistant Application

May 20, 2024

Interested in becoming a Volunteer Research Assistant with the Preston Lab? You can apply to one of our RA positions using this link: https://forms.gle/oXB2muVabkpkpFj17   Please note that the Preston Lab accepts Research Assistants on a rolling basis, depending on the needs of our lab during a given period of time. Due to the volume of applicants we receive, you will only be contacted if your application is selected to move on to the next round. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to our Lab Manager, Sara Abbas, at saabbas@austin.utexas.edu ... Read more » Undergraduate Research Assistant Application

Congratulations Ayesha!

Congratulations Ayesha!

March 27, 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Ayesha Nadiadwala for successfully defending her dissertation today! Ayesha joined the Preston Lab as a graduate student in Fall 2019. Co-mentored with Dr. Preston and Dr. Joey Dunsmoor, Ayesha spent her time as a graduate student at UT Austin exploring how different episodic memory processes are modulated by emotion. More specifically, she was interested in learning how emotion influences relationships between memory representations for events. Congratulations Ayesha! ... Read more » Congratulations Ayesha!