Memory, attention and face recognition in young and old adults and people with brain damage

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The purpose of the proposal is to investigate the psychological processes and brain mechanisms mediating different aspects of memory, attention and face-recognition. The proposed experiments are concerned as much with the interaction among the various components, as with the components themselves. This research extends and elaborates our previous findings that episodic memory, and the structures that mediate it in the medial temporal, influence a variety of other processes from perception to problem solving, from priming to semantics. In the process, these observations call attention to the vital role episodic memory plays in different aspects of our life.In this proposal, we focus on three projects. The first, concerned with episodic memory and attention, will test the hypothesis that the same structures in the parietal cortex that are involved in attention to perceptual input from the outside world, are also involved in memory search and recovery in the internal mental world. The second is concerned with the flexibility of episodic memory, and how the elements that comprise it can be manipulated independently of one another to form new memories. The third project focuses on the interaction between memory and face-perception in young and older adults. We wished to know whether hippocampal deterioration with age is responsible for the slight but noticeable loss in face-recognition that some older adults experience. In particular, we wished to know whether hippocampal 'pattern separation', the process by which similar stimuli are made distinctive at encoding, and thereby reducing memory interference, also contributes to making faces more distinctive and recognizable.