Dr. Crystal conducts research in animal cognition. The long-range goal is to understand how animals process events in time and remember these events in order to provide a theoretical framework for understanding disorders of memory. Dr. Crystal has a long-standing interest in studying mechanisms of temporal information processing - that is, our ability to make judgments about the passage of time. This research has focused on testing the hypothesis that timing is mediated by multiple, endogenous oscillators. More recently, Dr. Crystal's research has extended to the development of animal models of human cognition. This research has developed methods for assessing the content of memory in rats, using two complementary approaches. The first approach documented the content of episodic memory by assessing rats' knowledge about what, where, and when an event occurred in the past. The second approach evaluated the discrimination of a cognitive state (i.e., metacognition) in rats. The objective of this research is to develop animal models of memory disorders as in Alzheimer's disease.
Bold student names indicate a cognitive science standalone student.
| Author | Dissertation Title | Committee |
| Tamara, Carolina | Route Learning And Its Interaction With Visual Landmarks (May 2013) | Timberlake, W. (chair), Crystal, J., Goldstone, R., Todd, P. |
