Dr. Nicholas Turk-Browne

Nick Turk-Browne is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. He previously served on the faculty at Princeton University (2009-2017). He obtained his bachelors from the University of Toronto (2004) and doctorate from Yale University (2009). Dr. Turke-Browne’s research takes an integrative perspective, using behavioral studies, brain imaging, intracranial recordings, computational modeling, and machine learning to understand how different cognitive and neural systems interact. He has published extensively on the interaction between perception (how we experience the world) and memory (how we draw upon past experiences), including the learning mechanisms that transform perception into memory and the attentional mechanisms that regulate this transformation. Most recently, his lab has been developing techniques for brain imaging in awake infants and toddlers. The goal is to understand how babies experience the world and learn so efficiently, as well as to answer vexing questions such as why you cannot remember anything from the first few years of life, or “infantile amnesia”. Dr. Turke-Browne's work has been published in journals such as Science, Nature Neuroscience, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. He has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, and Intel Labs. He received Young Investigator Awards from the Vision Sciences Society (2016), Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2017), and Society of Experimental Psychologists (2018) and the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association (2015). He currently serves a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (since 2016).