Alison Montagrin
Function: Research & teaching fellow — “Sleep & Cognition ” Lab (Pr. SOPHIE Schwartz)
Affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, Department of Basic Neurosciences (UniGE)
Keywords: episodic memory, time, space, cognitive maps, goals, emotion, hippocampus
Short Biography
Alison Montagrin is a Research and Teaching Fellow (Maître-Assistante) at the University of Geneva in Basic Neurosciences. Her PhD challenged traditional views on emotional memory, emphasizing that memory facilitation is driven more by an event’s relevance to an individual’s goals than by emotional valence or arousal. She also developed the often-overlooked temporal aspect of episodic memory, exploring how mental representations of the past and future influence memory and decision-making.
Her current research, combining 7T or 3T MRI with Virtual Reality, examines the hippocampus’s role in encoding both temporal and spatial dimensions of goal-relevant memories, with a focus on how memories of the present and distant past/future are represented along the hippocampus’s anterior-posterior axis.
Key Publications
- *Montagrin A., *Croote DE., Preti MG., Lerman L., Baxter MG., & Schiller D. (2024). The hippocampus dissociates present from past and future goals. Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48648-9.
- Croote DE., Lai B., Hu J., Baxter MG., *Montagrin A., & *Schiller D. (2020). Delay discounting decisions are linked to temporal distance representations of world events across cultures. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-69700-w.
- Montagrin A., Saiote C., & Schiller D. (2018). The social hippocampus. Hippocampus. https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.22797.
- Montagrin, A., Brosch, T., & Sander, D. (2013). Goal conduciveness as a key determinant of memory facilitation. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033066.
*equal contribution
PhD Thesis
- MONTAGRIN, Alison. Emotion & memory: goal relevance as a key determinant of memory facilitation. Doctoral Thesis, 2015. https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:81092.
Media
- https://www.rts.ch/audio-podcast/2024/audio/comment-notre-cerveau-classe-t-il-nos-priorites-quotidiennes-28550796.html
- https://www.rts.ch/play/tv/rts-en-video/video/la-memoire-nest-pas-une-copie-conforme-de-la-realite?urn=urn:rts:video:11818049
- https://www.planetesante.ch/Magazine/Autour-de-la-maladie/Covid-19/Surcharge-mentale-en-temps-de-pandemie
Contact
Mail: alison.montagrin@unige.ch
Tel: +41 22 379 97 51
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4981-5916
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alison-montagrin-03786990/