I am a cognitive scientist interested in human memory. I am particularly interested in how we use our memories not only to help us recollect the past, but also to guide future behavior.
The primary questions that drive my research are: How do we learn across memories to extract the generalizable, predictable aspects of experience? How do those learned regularities influence how we encode new experiences into memory? My work draws inspiration from computational models of human memory and uses a range of methods, including behavior, fMRI, and EEG (both intracranial and scalp). Some of my ongoing projects aim to understand how acute stress shapes what we encode into memory and how sleep helps us to build up stable memories that serve future behavior and guide new learning.
I am currently a post doc in Anna Schapiro's lab at the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the NSF SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. I completed my graduate work with Nick Turk-Browne at Yale, where I also collaborated closely with Elizabeth Goldfarb. Before graduate school, I was an undergraduate and lab manager at New York University, where I worked with Lila Davachi and Sarah DuBrow on how we perceive and remember time.
You can contact me at brynns@sas.upenn.edu. Feel free to also check out my CV, Google Scholar, or Twitter.