Dr. Wilma Bainbridge

Biography

Wilma Bainbridge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. She received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from Yale University, where she studied visual neuroscience and human-robot interaction. After completing a year-long research internship in robotics at the University of Tokyo, she earned her Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on vision and memory. Following her doctoral studies, she underwent postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her research encompasses cognitive neuroscience, particularly the perception of memory, examining why certain items are intrinsically memorable and how the brain processes these items differently. Bainbridge utilizes a range of methodologies including behavioral experiments, computer vision, machine learning, and functional MRI to explore the characteristics of visual content that contribute to memory encoding. She has particularly focused on understanding the neural mechanisms behind the remembering of images, such as photographs of faces that tend to be more memorable than less salient information.

Research Interests

Experience