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= Ken A. Paller =

Ken A. Paller is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA. He holds the James Padilla Chair in Arts & Sciences and serves as Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Program in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern. He directs a training program for PhD students and postdocs, the Training Program in the Neuroscience of Human Cognition at Northwestern, supported by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke. His work in cognitive neuroscience has focused on human memory, consciousness, sleep, dreaming, and related topics. He has published over 200 scientific articles, reviews, and book chapters. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health. the Mind Science Foundation, the Mind and Life Institute, and other foundations and funding agencies. He was awarded the Senator Mark Hatfield Award from the Alzheimer's Association in 2008. From 2008 to 2016, he served as Editor for the Memory Section of the journal Neuropsychologia. From 2011 to 2015 he served on the Annual Meeting Program Committee for the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and chaired this committee from 2013 to 2015. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a Senior Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute.

Background
Paller was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Venice High School and then attended UCLA, where he majored in Psychobiology. For his junior year abroad, he attended the University of Kent at Canterbury. His PhD training in neuroscience was completed in 1986 at UCSD, where his mentors included Larry Squire, Steve Hillyard, and Marta Kutas. He then completed postdoctoral training at Yale, the University of Manchester, and Berkeley before becoming a professor at Northwestern University in 1994.

Early Research - Memory
Paller’s early research focused on aspects of human memory, including encoding and retrieval. He studied patients with memory disorders and healthy individuals using behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging methods. His early work documented neural signals at initial memory formation that predicted whether or not information would be remembered later. In a much-cited paper with Andrew R. Mayes and Marta Kutas in 1987, he introduced the term Dm to refer to the electrophysiological differences produced as a function of later memory performance. With his student Brian Gonsalves and other colleagues, he studied neural events that led to false memories. He also used electrophysiological methods to document differences in brain responses between conscious and unconscious memory phenomena. Whereas memory phenomena are typically assessed in recall and recognition tests (declarative memory tests), Paller found different results when unconscious memory was assessed, as in perceptual priming and other implicit memory tests.

Later Research - Memory and Sleep
Paller’s later research concerned the idea that learning is not a function only of the initial acquisition of knowledge, but that there are additional processing steps (known as consolidation) and that some of the work of consolidation takes place in the brain during sleep. Work in his laboratory was prominent in showing how subtle auditory stimulation during sleep could shape memory storage. These studies used a method that came to be known as Targeted Memory Reactivation or TMR. Studies with TMR showed that many types of learning are improved when pre-sleep learning is followed by memory reactivation during sleep.

Paller’s lab group also contributed to adapting the TMR method to produce lucid-dreaming experiences. In the study of these unusual experiences, when people realize they are dreaming in the midst of a dream, real-time two-way communication between dreamer and experimenter was demonstrated. In this way, the study of dreams can now include data on people’s experiences during a dream along with associated neural activity, instead of relying exclusively on people’s reports after they wake up to find out about their dreams.

Trainees
Paller provided training to many students and postdoctoral fellows who have gone on to have their own successful scientific careers. His trainees include Charan Ranganath (University of California, Davis), Galit Yovel (Tel Aviv University), Brian Gonsalves (California State University East Bay), Christine Hooker (Rush University), Wen Li (Florida State University), Joel Voss (University of Chicago), Tim Sweeny (University of Denver), Robert Hurley (Cleveland State University), Heather Lucas (Louisiana State University), James Antony (California Polytechnic State University), Iliana Vargas (Chicago Public Schools), Jessica Creery (NIH), Sadie Witkowski (University of Chicago), Stephan Boehm (Bangor University), Carmen Westerberg (Texas State University), Robert Morrison (Loyola University Chicago), Delphine Oudiette (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France), Xiaoqing Hu (Hong Kong University), Laura Batterink (University of Western Ontario), and Eitan Schechtman (University of California, Irvine).