Jeffrey M. 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

contact info:

Email: jzacks@wustl.edu
Phone: 314-935-8454
Office: Somers Family Hall 206

mailing address:

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

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

Zacks, J. M. (2020). Event perception and memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 71(1).
Stawarczyk, D., Wahlheim, C. N., Etzel, J. A., Snyder, A. Z., & Zacks, J. M. (2020). Aging and the encoding of changes in events: The role of neural activity pattern reinstatement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Stawarczyk, D., Bezdek, M. A., & Zacks, J. M. (2021). Event representations and predictive processing: The role of the midline default network core. Topics in Cognitive Science, 13, 164–186.
Wahlheim, C. N., Eisenberg, M. L., Stawarczyk, D., & Zacks, J. M. (2022). Understanding everyday events: Predictive-looking errors drive memory updating. Psychological Science, 33, 765–781.
Stawarczyk, D., Wahlheim, C. N., & Zacks, J. M. (2023). Adult age differences in event memory updating: The roles of prior-event retrieval and prediction. Psychology and Aging, 38(6), 519–533.
Sargent, J. Q., Richmond, L. L., Kellis, D. M., Smith, M. E., & Zacks, J. M. (in press). No evidence for chunking in spatial memory of route experience. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition.

From our podcast:

Your Brain on Movies, Pt. 1

Jeffrey Zacks shares some of the reasons we react the way we do at movies.

in the news:

10.30.24

The main events: How scenes from life shape consciousness, build memories

11.16.22

Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures announces first round of funded projects

Back to Ampersand

Event Cognition

Jeffrey M. Zacks

Coauthored with Gabriel A. Radvansky

Much of our behavior is guided by our understanding of events. We perceive events when we observe the world unfolding around us, participate in events when we act on the world, simulate events that we hear or read about, and use our knowledge of events to solve problems. In this book, Gabriel A. Radvansky and Jeffrey M. Zacks provide the first integrated framework for event cognition and attempt to synthesize the available psychological and neuroscience data surrounding it. This synthesis leads to new proposals about several traditional areas in psychology and neuroscience including perception, attention, language understanding, memory, and problem solving.

Radvansky and Zacks have written this book with a diverse readership in mind. It is intended for a range of researchers working within cognitive science including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, and education. Readers curious about events more generally such as those working in literature, film theory, and history will also find it of interest.

Oxford University Press