A trait oriented approach to the cognitive neuroscience of memory

在NSERC的持续支持下，我和我的学生在过去的15年里开发并维持了一个关于健康受试者记忆认知神经科学的详尽研究计划。更确切地说，我们集中精力研究记忆功能的不同相互关联的维度及其神经相关性。目前的建议旨在通过探索认知结构与情景记忆表现及其神经相关性的交叉来继续我们对情景记忆的认知神经科学研究。根据贝克的一般认知模型，一个人的认知结构是由人格特质，信仰和态度组成，并最终影响认知过程，如记忆。关于情景记忆系统，这种认知结构通过改善对某些类型信息的回忆或减少对其他类型信息的回忆来使记忆产生偏差。本研究的主要目的是探讨认知结构中的一个特殊特征--快感缺乏如何与情景记忆系统相互作用。快感缺失，定义为对所有或几乎所有活动的兴趣或快乐明显减少，与已知的调节记忆表现的因素交叉，即情感信息和奖励线索的处理。我们的建议的主要创新在于结合两个明显非常不同和独立的研究领域-贝克的通用认知模型和最近的快感缺乏模型-以表明记忆表现是由实验特定的因素，如所使用的刺激以及受试者特定的因素，如一个人的个人认知结构。* 具体来说，我们将研究特质快感缺失的存在如何影响正面和负面评价刺激的记忆表现，以及它如何调节奖励对记忆表现的增强作用。我们将进一步研究在我们的情感和奖励记忆任务中使用功能磁共振成像的快感缺乏对大脑活动的影响的神经相关性。一旦我们清楚地确定了特质性快感缺失对表现的影响，我们将使用重复经颅磁刺激（rTMS）将功能失活引入PFC的子区域，作为对其记忆功能的更直接测试。特质性快感缺失是一个探索认知结构、情景记忆表现与脑功能/结构关系的非常有趣和启发性的模型。这种方法可能会对情景记忆功能产生新的见解。它还可以为精神病人群的记忆问题的探索提供重要的基础，因为快感缺失是几种心理和神经系统疾病的核心特征。********

With continued support from NSERC, my students and I have developed and maintained an exhaustive program of research on the cognitive neuroscience of memory in healthy subjects over the past 15 years. More precisely, we have focused our efforts on examining different inter-related dimension of memory function and their neural correlates. The current proposal seeks to pursue our cognitive neuroscience studies of episodic memory by exploring how cognitive architecture intersects with episodic memory performance and its neural correlates. According to Beck's generic cognitive model, a person's cognitive architecture is composed of personality traits, beliefs, and attitudes and ultimately influences cognitive processes such as memory. With regards to the episodic memory system, this cognitive architecture biases memory by either improving recollection for certain types of information or decreasing recollection for other types of information.***The main objective of this proposal is to investigate how one specific trait of the cognitive architecture, anhedonia, interacts with the episodic memory system. Anhedonia, defined a markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities, intersects with factors known to moderate memory performance, namely the processing of affective information and reward cues. The main innovation of our proposal resides in combining two apparently very different and independent fields of research - the generic cognitive model of Beck and recent models of anhedonia - to show that memory performance is determined by experiment-specific factors such as the stimuli used as well as subject-specific factors such as a person's individual cognitive architecture. ***Concretely, we will examine how the presence of trait anhedonia influences memory performance for positively and negatively valenced stimuli and how it moderates the enhancing effect that reward has on memory performance. We will further investigate the neural correlates of the impact of anhedonia on brain activity using fMRI during our affective and reward memory tasks. Once we have clearly determined the impact of trait anhedonia on performance, we will use repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to introduce functional inactivations to sub-regions of the PFC as a more direct test of their functions in memory.***Examining trait anhedonia is a highly interesting and heuristic model to explore the relation between cognitive architecture, episodic memory performance and brain functions/structures. Such an approach is likely to yield fresh new insights into episodic memory functions. It can also provide an important foundation for the exploration of memory problems in psychiatric populations as anhedonia is a core feature of several psychological and neurological disorders. ********