Cognitive and neural bases of episodic memory

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Episodic memory enables us to consciously recollect personally-experienced events, and often includes rich detail on the spatial, temporal, and perceptual context surrounding these events. Two neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and dopamine, appear to be particularly important for these abilities. Yet, the bulk of the evidence on their roles comes from short-term manipulation of these neurotransmitters with agonists and antagonists and from observing patients with deterioration of these systems (e.g., in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases). As a fruitful alternative, we will use well-established peripheral indices of acetylcholine and dopamine levels in the brains of healthy individuals to look more closely at several different aspects of memory function thought to depend on one or both of these neurotransmitters. For each participant we can derive separate indices of acetylcholine and dopamine levels, enabling us to determine the degree to which one or both predict different aspects of performance. This approach is novel, minimally-invasive, inexpensive, and will fill in the gap among the behavioural, neuroimaging, and pharmacological literatures regarding these neurotransmitters’ influence on human memory.