Neural Correlates of Autobiographical Memory

描述(由申请人提供)：自传体记忆--人们对生活中事件的记忆--是他们对未来行为、他们在病史中报告的内容以及他们在许多形式的心理治疗和日常生活中使用的东西做出判断的基础。它的功能障碍是阿尔茨海默病、创伤后应激障碍、闭合性头部损伤以及几乎所有形式的一般记忆丧失的主要症状。到目前为止，对自传式或情节式记忆的神经基础的研究通常依赖于在实验室学习的材料，最少的情感参与，高度可控和简单的感觉环境，在一个非常短的时间间隔内，在一个地点。因此，许多已知在行为上对记忆有深刻影响的因素(即，情绪强度、感觉输入以及空间和时间背景)在学习过程中变化不够大，不足以在回忆中观察到影响，从而提供了对现实世界事件记忆中涉及的大脑系统的有限看法。在所提出的研究中，这些因素在编码时以现实的方式变化，并利用功能磁共振成像来探讨它们对回忆的神经基础的影响。三种不同类型的任务将被用来研究自传体记忆的神经关联：(1)对给定各种文字线索的个人生活事件的回忆；(2)对参与者在野外或实验室学习中拍摄的数字照片的再认；(3)对分阶段事件的线索再认。视觉图像处理、情绪内容和时空背景信息的变化将在编码时被测量，并被映射到它们在大脑中的相关处理区域。将对记忆提取不同阶段激活的网络组成部分有新的见解，包括记忆的搜索和产生以及对其准确性和适当性的监测。这项拟议的研究将通过连接对现实世界事件的记忆和对实验室刺激的记忆，促进对大脑系统的了解，这些系统涉及检索关于自传体事件的信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Autobiographical memory - people's memory for events from their lives - is a basis of judgments they make about their future behavior, what they report in their medical histories, and what they use in many forms of psychotherapy and everyday life. Its malfunction is a presenting symptom in Alzheimer's disease, posttraumatic stress disorder, closed head injury, and nearly all forms of general memory loss. To date, studies of the neural basis of autobiographical, or episodic, memory have generally relied on materials learned in the laboratory with minimal emotional involvement, a highly controlled and simple sensory environment, over one very short time interval, and in one location. Thus, many of the factors known behaviorally to have profound effects on memory (i.e., emotional intensity, sensory input, and spatial and temporal context) are not varied enough at learning to have effects that can be observed at recall, providing a limited view of the brain systems involved in memory for real-world events. In the proposed studies, these factors are varied in realistic ways at encoding and their effects on the neural basis of recall are probed using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Three different kinds of tasks will be used to investigate the neural correlates of autobiographical memory: (1) recall of personal life events given various word cues, (2) recognition of digital photographs which participants take in the field or study in the laboratory, and (3) cued recognition of staged events. Variations in visual imagery processes, emotional content, and spatiotemporal contextual information will be measured at encoding and mapped onto their associated processing regions in the brain. New insight will be gained into the network components activated at different stages of memory retrieval, including the search and production of the memory and the monitoring of its accuracy and appropriateness. The proposed research will advance knowledge about the brain systems involved in retrieving information about autobiographical events by bridging between memory for real-world events and memory for laboratory stimuli.