Competition in Episodic Memory: The Role of Cortical Reinstatment

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Maria Wimber
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2011 to 2013
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 195504211

Our episodic long-term memory allows us to consciously re-experience events (episodes) from our personal past. Its capacity to store information is theoretically unlimited, but due to the huge amount of information that is potentially available from memory, remembering goes not always without effort. In particular, memory performance is impaired when we are trying to recall past events that are highly similar to other stored memories, because similar memories are thought to compete with each other during retrieval. Although retrieval competition is a well established component of most cognitive theories of memory, there is little direct evidence, on a neural level, on how such competition arises. The present research plan aims at testing the hypothesis, derived from cognitive memory theory, that competition arises whenever a reminder (cue) simultaneously activates more than one memory, and that this simultaneous activation can be directly observed as cortical reinstatement. Participants will perform a cued recall test during which the activation state of single memory items can be tracked using multi-variate pattern classification applied to functional imaging (Experiment 1) and electrophysiological (Experiment 2) data. Experiment 3 will then investigate the existence of control processes, supposedly subserved by the prefrontal cortex, that resolve memory competition by down-regulating the activation states of competing memories. Using state-of-the art analysis techniques, the present project thus seeks to find direct neural evidence for a well-established assumption of many models of long-term memory.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Michael Anderson, Ph.D.