Factors influencing memory encoding and retrieval

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Identifying cognitive operations critical for successful memory performance has been an on-going effort of psychologists and neuroscientists. The long-term goal of my research program is to identify commonalities and differences between encoding and retrieval operations, and to determine how they interact, at both the cognitive and the neural level, to influence our ability to remember the past. Part 1 of this grant will examine whether individual, and experimenter-induced, differences in representing information in memory influence successful retrieval. It is likely that we can use different codes, verbal or spatial, to represent different types of information. The divided attention technique - performing a distracting task at the same time as the primary memory task - will be used to probe these memory representations. Neuroimaging studies suggest that distinct brain areas, and networks of regions, are specialized for representing and accessing different kinds of information during a memory test. The proposed research will use cognitive experiments and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regions, and networks, implicated in memory. While success at retrieving information from the past is one measure indexing memory status, the quality of one's memory is another. Part 2 of this grant will consider how different encoding conditions influence the quality of memory trace that is formed and subsequently retrieved, and will then develop a neural model characterizing these qualitatively different types of memories. fMRI will be used to identify the neural regions needed for recollection, and to determine whether sensory-specific reactivation of brain regions implicated at encoding contributes to successful recollection. Identifying and understanding variables which influence encoding and retrieval is the focus of this grant, and is important for a number of reasons. First, it highlights conditions and situations in which memory performance can be disrupted, providing insight into the limitations, at both the cognitive and the neural level of human cognitive processing. Second, this research will identify encoding operations that influence what is stored in memory, and what can ultimately be retrieved from the past.