Jeffrey Zacks

Jeffrey Zacks

Chair and Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Edgar James Swift Professor in Arts & Sciences
Professor of Radiology
PhD, Stanford University
MA, Stanford University
BA, Yale University
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    • Washington University
      CB 1125
      One Brookings Drive
      St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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    Jeff Zacks studies perception, memory, movies, and reading in the mind and the brain—including brains that are developing, aging, and disordered.

    Zacks studies cognition in naturalistic settings such as event understanding, navigation, and the brain's processing of film and media. One particular research focus is how cognition changes with healthy aging and with age-related neurological disorders. To pursue these questions, his laboratory uses behavioral tasks, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, and computational modeling.

    Selected Publications

    Richmond, L. L., Sargent, J. Q., Flores, S., & Zacks, J. M. (in press). Age Differences in Spatial Memory for Mediated Environments. Psychology and Aging. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000286

    Wahlheim, C. N., & Zacks, J. M. (2018). Memory guides the processing of event changes for older and younger adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

    Kurby, C. A., & Zacks, J. M. (2018). Preserved neural event segmentation in healthy older adults. Psychology and aging, 33(2), 232.

    Richmond, L. L., & Zacks, J. M. (2017). Constructing experience: Event models from perception to action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(12), 962–980.
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.08.005

    Flores, S., Bailey, H. R., Eisenberg, M. L., & Zacks, J. M. (2017). Event segmentation improves event memory up to one month later. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(8), 1183.