Neural Correlates of Autobiographical Memory

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Autobiographical memory - people's memory for events from their lives - is a basis of judgments they make about their future behavior, what they report in their medical histories, and what they use in many forms of psychotherapy and everyday life. Its malfunction is a presenting symptom in Alzheimer's disease, posttraumatic stress disorder, closed head injury, and nearly all forms of general memory loss. To date, studies of the neural basis of autobiographical, or episodic, memory have generally relied on materials learned in the laboratory with minimal emotional involvement, a highly controlled and simple sensory environment, over one very short time interval, and in one location. Thus, many of the factors known behaviorally to have profound effects on memory (i.e., emotional intensity, sensory input, and spatial and temporal context) are not varied enough at learning to have effects that can be observed at recall, providing a limited view of the brain systems involved in memory for real-world events. In the proposed studies, these factors are varied in realistic ways at encoding and their effects on the neural basis of recall are probed using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Three different kinds of tasks will be used to investigate the neural correlates of autobiographical memory: (1) recall of personal life events given various word cues, (2) recognition of digital photographs which participants take in the field or study in the laboratory, and (3) cued recognition of staged events. Variations in visual imagery processes, emotional content, and spatiotemporal contextual information will be measured at encoding and mapped onto their associated processing regions in the brain. New insight will be gained into the network components activated at different stages of memory retrieval, including the search and production of the memory and the monitoring of its accuracy and appropriateness. The proposed research will advance knowledge about the brain systems involved in retrieving information about autobiographical events by bridging between memory for real-world events and memory for laboratory stimuli.