Enhanced communication during brain imaging of children and older adults: Cognitive neuroscience of memory across the lifespan

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Memory is a key ability in early life, allowing us to learn new things about our world. It remains important throughout the lifespan, and shows declines even in healthy aging. Recent advances in brain imaging have allowed us to start asking questions about the subtle ways in which memory changes across our lives. Our proposed research will characterize age-related changes in how the brain forms, modifies, and accesses our memories. One program of research will ask whether in older adults, the simple act of retrieving a memory from an experience prioritizes it to be enhanced during the special memory processing that occurs during sleep. A second research program will assess whether developmental differences in what gets extracted from an experience begins during the original perception of the ongoing experience, with children potentially segmenting their experience into finer-grained sub-events than adults. A third study will ask whether retrieving a memory impacts what is stored, with differences in the maturity of the brain dictating how its contents get transformed. Our work requires the ability to present engaging, complex, real-world stimuli with sound to participants while they are immersed in the noisy environment of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Moreover, it is of utmost importance that our youngest and oldest volunteers alike feel safe, comfortable, and reassured in the MRI. To accomplish this research, we are requesting a two-way MRI communication system that allows for both the delivery of sound stimuli to volunteers in the MRI, as well as for the volunteers to speak back to the researchers at any time. This system is the only one in the world to provide active noise cancellation for both headphones and microphone that is custom to the unique sound profile of the MRI scanner; it will also enhance participants' physical comfort with its low-profile design. These programs of research, made possible by the requested equipment, will help us understand how the neural basis of human memoryessential for learning and central to our identities as humanschanges over the lifespan.