Neural mechanisms involved in recognition of famous people

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My overarching research goal is to understand the mental processes and brain mechanisms that allow humans to remember past experiences and to recognize those aspects of their environment they have encountered before. Recognition memory, i.e., the ability to distinguish between new and previously encountered people, objects, or places, benefits many aspects of human adaptive behaviour. We constantly use this ability in everyday life, such as when we greet colleagues at the shopping mall, but not strangers. In past pertinent psychological and neuroscience research, recognition has been studied primarily in the context of one experimental approach, namely the study-test paradigm: participants first study a list of stimuli in the laboratory and are subsequently required to select the previously studied 'old' stimuli from a larger mixed set that includes 'new' ones as well. The mechanisms that support recognition based on autobiographical life-time experience, rather than a study list in the laboratory, are presently much less well understood. In the proposed program of neuroimaging research, we aim to shed light on the brain mechanisms that are critical for recognition under these 'real-life' circumstances. We aim to present participants with names, faces, or voices of famous ('old') and non-famous ('new') people, and ask them to indicate which ones they may have encountered before in the media. One of the core research question we will address is whether distinct brain regions become involved in these memory decisions depending on whether knowledge about the person is accessible (Ah, that's a famous athlete!), or whether successful recognition is based just on a sense of familiarity. By using these fame judgments, we aim to overcome limitations in our current understanding of recognition memory that are related to an over-reliance on a single experimental approach. This brain-imaging research program will also offer promising training opportunities at various levels for career development in science, industry, and Canada's knowledge-based economy more broadly.