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

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This proposal continues a long-standing research program whose purpose is to investigate the psychological processes and brain mechanisms mediating different aspects of memory, attention and face-recognition in young and older adults, and in people with brain damage. The proposed experiments examine the psychological implications that follow from theories of brain function in systems neuroscience, in particular our own Component Process Model (CPM; Moscovitch et al., 2016); we in turn use these psychological findings to refine our understanding of brain function and update the model. 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 non-memory processes from perception to problem solving to empathy. ******In this proposal, we describe three projects related to the CPM and the hippocampus (HPC) in particular. The first, concerned with spatial components of episodic memory, follows our observation that participants spontaneously incorporate spatial information into their memory of events. In a series of experiments on young and older adults, and on amnesic patients, we will test the hypothesis that even for single words, recollection, but not familiarity, has a substantial spatial component, and that this component is mediated by the HPC. The second project is concerned with event boundaries during virtual navigation using Google Street View, and with how these boundaries influence memory for temporal duration and order. We hypothesized that turns at intersections act as event boundaries which increase HPC activation that lead to better recollection, but not familiarity, of pre-turn events, and greater differentiation between events across boundaries than within boundaries. The third project focuses on the contribution of the HPC to face-perception as predicted by the CPM. Pattern separation is a process by which similar stimuli are made distinctive at encoding. We hypothesized that pattern separation processes in the dentate gyrus (DG) of the HPC should contribute to categorical perception of two highly similar faces, since categorical perception accentuates differences between two faces across, but not within, category boundaries. If true, then patients with HPC lesions or deterioration, should show reduced categorical perception. Preliminary evidence indicates they do. In healthy controls, greater HPC activation as measured in fMRI should accompany face discrimination and identification across, than within, face category boundaries. **