Medial temporal and prefrontal contributions to short-term recognition

描述(申请人提供)：辨认以前遇到的材料的能力随着年龄的增长而下降，并因阿尔茨海默病、中风和精神分裂症等神经功能障碍而受损。指导认知的受控搜索和决策过程在患者群体中尤其容易丢失，并依赖于前额叶(PFC)和内侧颞叶(MTL)的存储机制。然而，还不清楚PFC和MTL的亚区是如何促进基于回忆和熟悉的再认的。此外，对MTL的研究大多是对长期认知任务进行的，但最近的证据发现MTL患者存在短期认知缺陷。目前尚不清楚它们的短期损伤是否反映了回忆或熟悉的操作。关键是，如果长期和短期任务的共同过程是损害的基础，这将对我们如何治疗和恢复MTL和PFC损害的患者具有重要的医学意义。本研究旨在确定MTL和PFC亚区在短期再认中的作用。回忆和熟悉过程的贡献将使用一种新的过程分离程序(PDP)来估计。三个相辅相成的实验，每个都有不同的方法，将实施PDP范式。首先，功能磁共振成像(FMRI)研究将确定PFC和MTL对短期记忆和熟悉程度的贡献是否与先前在长期识别任务中发现的贡献相匹配。其次，患者研究将阐明PFC和MTL对于回忆和熟悉的必要性。第三，由于患者缺陷识别缺陷可能次要于编码缺陷，PFC对回忆和熟悉的必要性将在接受重复经颅磁刺激(r-TMS)到PFC的健康对照组中进行测试。这些实验将促进对调节记忆的调节过程和存储结构的理解。短期记忆和长期记忆通常被认为是独立的实体，建立两者共有的过程或结构的证据将为记忆障碍提供有价值的见解。这些知识可以揭示伴随着正常衰老、中风、阿尔茨海默病、精神分裂症和心脏骤停的记忆缺陷的本质。这些知识可以用来开发针对改善记忆的药物和行为疗法。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to recognize previously encountered material declines with age and is impaired by neurological dysfunctions such as Alzheimer's disease, stroke, and schizophrenia. The controlled search and decision processes that guide recognition are especially prone to loss in patient populations, and depend on the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and storage mechanisms in the medial temporal lobes (MTL). However, it is unclear how sub-regions of the PFC and MTL contribute to recollection and familiarity based recognition. Moreover, the MTL have mostly been studied with long-term recognition tasks, but recent evidence has uncovered short-term recognition deficits in MTL patients. It is unknown whether their short- term impairments reflect the operations of recollection or familiarity. Critically, if common processes underlie impairments on long and short-term tasks, it would have important medical implications for how we might treat and rehabilitate patients with MTL and PFC damage. The proposed studies aim to identify the roles of MTL and PFC sub-regions to short-term recognition. The contributions of recollection and familiarity processes will be estimated using a novel variation of the Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP). Three complementary experiments, each with a different methodology, will implement the PDP paradigm. First, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study will identify whether the PFC and MTL contributions to short-term recollection and familiarity match those previously identified in long-term recognition tasks. Second, a patient study will elucidate the necessity of the PFC and the MTL for recollection and familiarity. Third, because patient deficits recognition deficits could be secondary to encoding deficits, the necessity of the PFC for recollection and familiarity will be tested in healthy controls undergoing repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (r-TMS) to the PFC. These experiments will advance understanding about the regulatory processes and storage structures that mediate memory. Short-term memory and long-term memory are often considered separate entities, and evidence establishing processes or structures common to both would provide valuable insights into memory disorders. Such knowledge could uncover the nature of memory deficits that accompany normal aging, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, and cardiac arrest. Such knowledge can be used to develop drug and behavioral therapies targeted at improving memory.