Neurophysiological circuits underlying episodic memory formation in the human brain

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Learning and memory formation play a central role in our everyday lives. The critical nature of our ability to acquire new information and to remember previous events is manifested in a variety of conditions that affect memory ranging from learning deficits in children all the way to Alzheimer's disease and related conditions in the elderly. Previous studies have shown that the hippocampus and related structures in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) play a critical role in memory formation for places, images or words. Less is known about how spatiotemporal sequences and events are encoded and recalled. By using movies as a proxy to real-life memory formation for episodic events. Dr. Gabriel Kreiman at the Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, will investigate how neuronal activity in the human MTL support the formation of episodic memories during movie events and how the hippocampus interacts with neocortical areas and the amygdala during learning. Computer vision and machine learning techniques will be used to develop detailed annotations of movie events to characterize each sequence of frames in terms of its low-level properties, high-level content and emotional aspects and to predict memory formation for episodic events from audiovisual and emotional content. Furthermore, the researchers will combine this machine learning approach with neurophysiological recordings in the MTL of patients with epilepsy to understand how episodic memories for short movie events are encoded and recalled. Advancing our understanding of the neural circuits and interactions that orchestrate memory formation will pave the way towards developing innovative technologies to directly interact with the human MTL to enhance learning of everyday episodic information. The machine learning approach used here to characterize recall of complex audio-visual events will provide systematic metrics to make predictions about memory formation, therefore holding the promise of predicting recall in educational settings. Studying how hippocampal neurons participate in the encoding and recall of episodic events is likely to have major clinical implications for understanding and developing interventions for neurological conditions including age-related dementias and learning disabilities in children. This project will also offer valuable training opportunities for undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to gain first hand experience in a cutting edge interdisciplinary study involving computer science, cognitive science, neurophysiology and neurology.