A trait oriented approach to the cognitive neuroscience of memory

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With continued support from NSERC, my students and I have developed and maintained an exhaustive program of research on the cognitive neuroscience of memory in healthy subjects over the past 15 years. More precisely, we have focused our efforts on examining different inter-related dimension of memory function and their neural correlates. The current proposal seeks to pursue our cognitive neuroscience studies of episodic memory by exploring how cognitive architecture intersects with episodic memory performance and its neural correlates. According to Beck's generic cognitive model, a person's cognitive architecture is composed of personality traits, beliefs, and attitudes and ultimately influences cognitive processes such as memory. With regards to the episodic memory system, this cognitive architecture biases memory by either improving recollection for certain types of information or decreasing recollection for other types of information.***The main objective of this proposal is to investigate how one specific trait of the cognitive architecture, anhedonia, interacts with the episodic memory system. Anhedonia, defined a markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities, intersects with factors known to moderate memory performance, namely the processing of affective information and reward cues. The main innovation of our proposal resides in combining two apparently very different and independent fields of research - the generic cognitive model of Beck and recent models of anhedonia - to show that memory performance is determined by experiment-specific factors such as the stimuli used as well as subject-specific factors such as a person's individual cognitive architecture. ***Concretely, we will examine how the presence of trait anhedonia influences memory performance for positively and negatively valenced stimuli and how it moderates the enhancing effect that reward has on memory performance. We will further investigate the neural correlates of the impact of anhedonia on brain activity using fMRI during our affective and reward memory tasks. Once we have clearly determined the impact of trait anhedonia on performance, we will use repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to introduce functional inactivations to sub-regions of the PFC as a more direct test of their functions in memory.***Examining trait anhedonia is a highly interesting and heuristic model to explore the relation between cognitive architecture, episodic memory performance and brain functions/structures. Such an approach is likely to yield fresh new insights into episodic memory functions. It can also provide an important foundation for the exploration of memory problems in psychiatric populations as anhedonia is a core feature of several psychological and neurological disorders. ********