Lili Sahakyan

Lili Sahakyan is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with affiliations in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Her research focuses on human long-term memory mechanisms, intentional forgetting, and memory in populations at risk for psychopathology such as schizophrenia and schizotypy. She leads the Cognition, Memory, and Forgetting (CMFlab) laboratory, which employs experimental, computational, and neuroimaging techniques to study memory control and its neural underpinnings.

Her research interests are centered on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of memory inhibition, contextual influences on memory storage and retrieval, and how these processes differ in clinical and nonclinical populations. Key areas include the theoretical development of directed forgetting paradigms, individual differences in memory performance, and the role of physiological measures like pupil dilation and eye movements in assessing memory strength.

Recent work highlights collaborations exploring schizotypy traits, psychosis prodromes, and their connections to memory deficits. Her publications analyze both behavioral and neurobiological data to dissect active vs. passive forgetting forms, stimulus familiarity effects, and cross-disciplinary applications of memory research. No scientific awards are explicitly mentioned in the texts.

Advising and grants: No specific grant details or student advisees are listed in the provided materials. Her research is supported through institutional affiliations and peer-reviewed publications.

Labs/Teams: She directs the CMFlab at the University of Illinois, an interdisciplinary group investigating memory control processes. The lab's work integrates behavioral experiments with neuroimaging and computational modeling to address clinical and cognitive questions.