The Hippocampal System and Relational(Declarative) Memory Processes

描述(申请人提供)：我们在最初的资助期取得的进展(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。这一更新应用程序试图发现海马体在实时构建和使用记忆中扮演着关键角色，海马体是实现长期记忆壮举的明确必要的大脑结构。由于海马体病理与许多大脑疾病有关，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的范围之外，这对于理解这些疾病的病理机制和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的奖励阶段所取得的进展的基础上，展示了海马体如何参与以非常短的时间尺度(即，秒)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，而不是“保留延迟”。此外，我们将展示海马体是如何直接和立即地与记忆的各种行为表达联系在一起的；也就是说，如何利用海马体处理的时刻到时刻的分支来实时控制我们与环境中信息的交互。我们的研究将使用复杂的行为方法，如眼球跟踪，结合对健康个体的功能神经成像研究，以及对有局限性海马区损害的健忘症患者的神经心理学研究。因此，我们将唯一能够确定海马体在在线处理过程中通常如何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。在这个网络/系统水平上研究海马区的处理直接关系到对神经病理疾病的理解，这些疾病被广泛地描述为在网络水平上扰乱大脑功能。

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.