Neural mechanisms involved in recognition of famous people

我的首要研究目标是了解心理过程和大脑机制，这些过程和大脑机制使人类能够记住过去的经历，并认识到他们以前遇到过的环境的那些方面。识别记忆，即区分新的和以前遇到的人、物体或地方的能力，有益于人类适应行为的许多方面。我们在日常生活中经常使用这种能力，比如在购物中心和同事打招呼，而不是和陌生人打招呼。在过去相关的心理学和神经科学研究中，识别主要是在一种实验方法的背景下进行研究的，即研究-测试范式：参与者首先在实验室中研究一系列刺激，然后要求他们从一个更大的混合集（包括“新”刺激）中选择之前研究过的“旧”刺激。目前，支持基于自传式终身经验而不是实验室研究清单的识别机制还不太清楚。在拟议的神经成像研究项目中，我们的目标是阐明在这些“现实生活”环境下对识别至关重要的大脑机制。我们的目标是向参与者展示名人（“老”）和非名人（“新”）的名字、面孔或声音，并要求他们指出他们之前可能在媒体上遇到过哪些人。我们要解决的一个核心研究问题是，不同的大脑区域是否会参与这些记忆决策，这取决于对这个人的了解是否容易获得（啊，那是一个著名的运动员！），或者成功的识别是否仅仅基于一种熟悉感。通过使用这些名声判断，我们的目标是克服我们目前对识别记忆的理解中的限制，这些限制与过度依赖单一的实验方法有关。这个脑成像研究项目还将为科学、工业和加拿大更广泛的知识经济领域的职业发展提供有前途的各级培训机会。

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.