The Hippocampal System and Relational(Declarative) Memory Processes

描述（由申请人提供）：我们在初始资助期间所取得的进展（海马体和关系（陈述性）记忆）对记忆研究领域产生了巨大的影响，现在人们普遍认为关系记忆是海马体的主要功能。这个更新的应用程序试图发现海马体，一个对长期记忆的技能明确必要的大脑结构，如何在实时记忆的构建和使用中发挥关键作用。由于海马体病理与许多脑部疾病有关，包括健忘症、精神分裂症、阿尔茨海默病和自闭症谱系，我们努力将海马体的功能描述扩展到传统的长期记忆范围之外，这对于理解这些疾病的病理机制以及开发准确的诊断和治疗方法是必要的。拟议的研究建立在我们在最初奖励期间所取得的进展的基础上，表明海马体如何参与在非常短的时间尺度（即几秒钟）内发生的记忆表达。目前的研究将进一步推进，并将寻求确定海马体在真正的在线记忆处理中的作用，没有“保留延迟”。此外，我们将展示海马体如何与记忆的各种行为表达直接和立即联系在一起；也就是说，海马体处理的实时分支如何被用来实时控制我们与环境中信息的互动。我们的研究将采用复杂的行为方法，如眼动追踪，结合健康人的功能神经成像研究和有局限性海马损伤的健忘症患者的神经心理学研究。因此，我们将独特地确定海马体在在线处理过程中如何正常地与大脑的其他部分相互作用，以及当海马体的功能完整性受到损害时，这些交易是如何被破坏的。在这种网络/系统水平上研究海马处理与理解神经病理疾病直接相关，神经病理疾病被广泛认为是在网络水平上破坏大脑功能。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The progress that we made during the initial funding period (The Hippocampus and Relational (Declarative) Memory) has had a tremendous impact on the field of memory research in general, and it is now widely accepted that relational memory is a primary function of the hippocampus. This renewal application seeks to discover how the hippocampus, a brain structure unequivocally necessary for feats of long-term memory, plays a crucial role in the construction and use of memory in real-time. Because hippocampal pathology has been implicated in many brain disorders, including amnesia, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and the autism spectrum, our efforts to extend the functional description of the hippocampus beyond the traditional purview of long-term memory are necessary for understanding the pathological mechanisms of these diseases and for developing accurate assays for their diagnosis and treatment. The proposed studies build upon the strides we have made during the initial award period in showing how the hippocampus participates in expressions of memory that occur on very short timescales (i.e., seconds). The current studies will push further, and will seek to determine the role of the hippocampus in truly on-line memory processing, with no "retention delay." Furthermore, we will show how the hippocampus is directly and immediately linked to various behavioral expressions of memory; that is, how the moment-to-moment ramifications of hippocampal processing are used to control in real-time our interactions with the information in the environment. Our studies will employ sophisticated behavioral methods, such as eye-tracking, in conjunction with both functional neuroimaging studies in healthy individuals and with neuropsychological studies of amnesic patients with circumscribed hippocampal damage. We will therefore be uniquely able to determine both how the hippocampus normally interacts with the rest of the brain during on-line processing, and how these transactions are disrupted when the functional integrity of the hippocampus is compromised. Studying hippocampal processing at this network/systems level is directly relevant to understanding neuropathological disorders, which are widely characterized as disrupting brain function at a network level.