Nelly Matorina

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“My earliest memory is of a dream.”
Anne Carson, Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)
My research explores the role of sleep and dreaming in memory consolidation.

I’m a cognitive neuroscience PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto working with Dr. Morgan Barense. I hold a FAST (Faculty of Arts and Sciences Top Doctoral) Fellowship, an NSERC PGS-D, and am a Junior Fellow at Massey College.

My doctoral research primarily explores two major research questions:

1) What is the role of the fornix in the consolidation of memories during sleep?

2) What is the role of sleep in the consolidation of autobiographical memories and rich, naturalistic stimuli (e.g., videos)?

I recently presented a poster at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference (CNS) titled Sleep impairs memory in a patient with anterograde amnesia.  We found that a patient with fornix damage  could recall several details after a wake delay but not a nap.



Previously, I completed a BSc. and MSc. at Queen’s University. My MSc thesis, written under the supervision of Dr. Jordan Poppenk, explored the role of time and sleep on various forms of gist memory. This research has been published in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.