Subregional Analysis of the Human Medial Temporal Lobe in Episodic Memory

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). A major advance in the study of the brain has been the discovery of specific regions that play a critical role in memory. These regions include the medial temporal lobe, which includes several different interconnected structures. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Barbara Knowlton and colleagues at UCLA will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to discover the different roles of these regions in human memory, and how they work together to support the rich, detailed memories of our experiences that define us as people. Much of the work is motivated by theories of human memory that state that one medial temporal lobe region, the CA3 region of the hippocampus, is very important for the creation of distinct memories for events, and allows us to keep memories for similar events from blending together. Dr. Knowlton and her research team will test the idea that activity in the CA3 during learning is directly related to how robust and long-lasting memories will be. The experiments will also compare brain activity when people learn information by trying to think about what is unique about each item to brain activity when people learn information by concentrating on what is similar across items. The research hypothesis is that there will be more activation in the CA3 region in the first kind of learning because the brain will be forming distinctive memories. Additionally, the research will test the idea that the same pattern of activity that occurs in the medial temporal lobe when an item is learned will be repeated when that same item is later remembered. These experiments will provide important new information about how neural circuits form human memories, and thus will be the source of insights into how memory can be improved. Furthermore, this proposal will train graduate students in high resolution and cortical unfolding techniques, which can be applied to other areas of cognitive neuroscience.