Professor Zacks studies perception and cognition using behavioral experiments, functional MRI, computational modeling, and testing of neurological patients.
One line of Zacks' research examines how people parse the continuous stream of behavior into meaningful events, and how this affects memory and cognition. Another line examines how mental imagery contributes to reasoning about spatial relations, especially how mental representations of one’s body are updated during imagery and reasoning.
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.