The Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago enables research answering fundamental questions about the mind and its dynamic interaction with the biological systems of the body. Our researchers seek to understand the relationships between the mind, the brain and the body in health and in disease. Our institute is unique in bringing together a diverse group of researchers who investigate these questions in different model organisms using state of the art techniques.

Latest Research

Work from the Awh and Vogel lab found evidence for a distinct class of load-sensitive neural activity that indexes items without representing their contents per se. By analyzing electroencephalogram activity while adult human subjects stored varying numbers of items in visual working memory, Thyer et al. 2022, precisely tracked the number of individuated items stored in working memory and robustly predicted individual differences in working memory capacity.

Professor Leslie Kay reviews COVID-19 infection via the olfactory system and the potential consequences of the body’s inflammatory response. She discusses the potential long-term implications of neurodegeneration observed in cortical areas that have connections with the olfactory system.

The Awh and Vogel Lab develops a change localization task variant that provides a highly reliable and sensitive approach for measuring visual working memory capacity. Zhao et al., 2022 shows the new task variant is far more reliable than the traditional change detection task, requiring only half the number of trials to achieve robust reliability.

Research from the London Lab investigates changes in brain connectivity during the critical development period for song learning in the zebra finch. By using functional imaging, Layden et al. 2020, identified relationships between functional connectivity changes in specific brain regions involved in auditory processing and behavioral changes during this period.

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