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项关于健康受试者记忆的认知神经科学的详尽研究计划。更准确地说，我们的努力集中在检查记忆功能的不同相互关联的维度及其神经关联上。目前的建议试图通过探索认知结构如何与情景记忆表现及其神经关联相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，一个人的认知结构由个性特征、信念和态度组成，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偏向记忆。*本方案的主要目的是研究认知结构的一个特定特征--快感缺失--如何与情景记忆系统相互作用。快感缺乏症定义为对所有或几乎所有活动的兴趣或快感明显减弱，它与已知的调节记忆表现的因素交叉，即处理情感信息和奖励线索。我们建议的主要创新在于结合了两个明显截然不同且相互独立的研究领域--贝克的通用认知模型和最近的快感缺失模型--表明记忆表现是由特定于实验的因素决定的，比如使用的刺激，以及特定于主题的因素，比如一个人的个人认知结构。*具体地说，我们将考察特质快感缺失的存在如何影响正价和负价刺激下的记忆表现，以及它如何减缓奖励对记忆表现的增强作用。在我们的情感和奖赏记忆任务中，我们将使用功能磁共振成像进一步研究快感缺乏对大脑活动影响的神经相关性。一旦我们清楚地确定了快感缺乏症对表现的影响，我们将使用重复的经颅磁刺激(RTMS)将功能失活引入PFC的亚区，作为对它们在记忆中的功能的更直接的测试。*检测快感缺失是一个非常有趣的启发式模型，可以探索认知结构、情景记忆表现和大脑功能/结构之间的关系。这样的方法可能会对情节记忆功能产生新的见解。它还可以为探索精神病人群中的记忆问题提供重要的基础，因为快感缺乏是几种心理和神经疾病的核心特征。********

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. ********