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

该提议的目的是研究调节记忆、注意力和面孔识别不同方面的心理过程和大脑机制。拟议的实验既关注组件本身，也关注不同组件之间的相互作用。本研究对我们之前的发现进行了扩展和阐述，即情景记忆及其在内侧时间中的中介结构影响着从知觉到问题解决、从启动到语义的各种其他过程。在这个过程中，这些观察唤起了人们对情景记忆在我们生活的不同方面所起的重要作用的关注。在这个建议中，我们集中在三个项目上。第一个涉及情景记忆和注意力，将检验这样一个假设，即顶叶皮质中参与注意来自外部世界的知觉输入的相同结构，也参与内部心理世界的记忆搜索和恢复。第二个是关于情节记忆的灵活性，以及组成它的元素如何相互独立地操作来形成新的记忆。第三个项目侧重于年轻人和老年人的记忆和面孔感知之间的相互作用。我们想知道，随着年龄的增长，海马体的退化是否是导致一些老年人面部识别能力轻微但明显丧失的原因。特别是，我们想知道，海马体的“模式分离”，即相似的刺激在编码时被区分开来，从而减少记忆干扰的过程，是否也有助于使面孔更加独特和可识别。

The purpose of the proposal is to investigate the psychological processes and brain mechanisms mediating different aspects of memory, attention and face-recognition. The proposed experiments are concerned as much with the interaction among the various components, as with the components themselves. 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 other processes from perception to problem solving, from priming to semantics. In the process, these observations call attention to the vital role episodic memory plays in different aspects of our life.In this proposal, we focus on three projects. The first, concerned with episodic memory and attention, will test the hypothesis that the same structures in the parietal cortex that are involved in attention to perceptual input from the outside world, are also involved in memory search and recovery in the internal mental world. The second is concerned with the flexibility of episodic memory, and how the elements that comprise it can be manipulated independently of one another to form new memories. The third project focuses on the interaction between memory and face-perception in young and older adults. We wished to know whether hippocampal deterioration with age is responsible for the slight but noticeable loss in face-recognition that some older adults experience. In particular, we wished to know whether hippocampal 'pattern separation', the process by which similar stimuli are made distinctive at encoding, and thereby reducing memory interference, also contributes to making faces more distinctive and recognizable.