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

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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.