Ian Dobbins

Ian Dobbins

Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences​
PHD, University of California, Davis
MA, Western Washington University
BS, University of Washington

contact info:

mailing address:

  • Washington University
    CB 1125
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

​Professor Dobbins studies the cognitive process and neural mechanisms underlying how people both deliberately and automatically recover memories. Tools used in his laboratory include behavioral experiments, decision modeling, and brain imaging with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Dobbins' research particularly focuses on how regions within the prefrontal cortex contribute to the deliberate retrieval of memories and how regions in other parts of the brain may instead regulate more automatic expressions of memory.

Selected Publications

Dobbins, I. G., & Han, S. (2006). Cue- versus probe-dependent prefrontal cortex activity during contextual remembering. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1439-1452.

Dobbins, I. G. & Han, S. (2006). Isolating rule- versus evidence-based prefrontal activity during episodic and lexical discrimination: A functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of detection theory distinctions. Cerebral Cortex, 16, 1614-1622.

Dobbins, I. G. & Wagner, A. D. (2005). Domain-general and domain-sensitive prefrontal mechanisms for recollecting events and detecting novelty, Cerebral Cortex. 15, 1768-1778.

Dobbins, I. G., Schnyer, D. M., Verfaellie, M., & Schacter, D. L. (2004). Cortical activity reductions during repetition priming can result from rapid response learning. Nature, 428, 316-319.