Deborah E. Hannula, Ph.D. - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system consists of the hippocampus and adjacent cortical structures (i.e., entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices) that are critical for forming and retrieving long-term declarative memories. As a convergence site for highly processed, multimodal input the hippocampus is ideally suited to bind together the relations among perceptually distinct items. Conventional theories suggest that the hippocampus does not contribute to working memory maintenance, but recent research suggests that the hippocampus may be necessary for short-term maintenance of relational information. A second unresolved issue in the literature is whether different MTL subregions make qualitatively different contributions to memory. The proposed experiments use event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to test: (1) whether the hippocampus is recruited when memory for arbitrary relations must be maintained in working memory, and (2) whether different MTL subregions are involved in encoding of item and relational memory, respectively. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

Attention is well known to be critically important for learning and memory but relatively less is known about how attention could be influenced by what one remembers from the past. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Deborah Hannula will conduct experiments combining eye-tracking with functional MRI to characterize the cognitive and neural processes underlying the capture of attention by episodic long-term memory. These studies will address questions about how long-term memory retrieval, particularly retrieval of negative memory, can influence goal-directed behavior by a) identifying the neural mechanisms that are correlated with memory-based capture, and b) identifying ways to avoid and disengage from such capture. This project combines memory and attention, two typically separated areas of studies, to investigate attention in the context of memory retrieval. This integrative approach moves one step closer to gaining an understanding of the highly interactive cognitive processes taking place when the brain operates in the real world.

Characterization of attention capture by long-term memory is important because in some situations long-term memory retrieval is undesirable (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder). Identifying the neural mechanisms involved in suppressing or disengaging attention from long-term memory may lead to new developments that could help remediate these symptoms in psychiatric populations. To complement the research objectives outlined above, the PI will also implement an education plan that will provide students and community members with interactive and accessible introductions to cognitive science, with an emphasis on memory and attention.