Context resolution and variability: Identifying learning strategies to optimize hippocampal representations

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

A student in a Cognitive Psychology seminar asked, at the end of a unit on long-term memory: "What do experts know about memory that students can apply to learning?" This question identifies a key challenge in the field of memory research: translating cognitive neuroscience findings from the laboratory into strategies that are useful in the real-world. Although memory researchers have identified a set of well-accepted findings and strategies for memory success (for example: elaboration, pattern separation, and transfer-appropriate processing), these strategies have rarely been integrated or even contrasted with one another. By doing so in the current project, we may be able to identify common principles of memory function that translate to real-world learning and memory. We expect that these common principles will increase our understanding of how the brain codes memories and will reveal additional strategies that can be used to improve learning. The ideas from this project will be translated into strategies that will be taught to students entering college. This outreach program will increase student confidence and success and is intended to improve educational outcomes relative to higher education costs. Well-established principles, including transfer-appropriate processing, encoding specificity, and elaboration, are known to produce benefits to long-term memory in the laboratory. However, we do not yet know: 1) how these principles relate to one another or to hippocampal memory representations and 2) how these principles can be translated into real-world implications. The first question is of great theoretical and scientific significance and must be answered for our understanding of long-term episodic memory to advance, whereas the second is of great educational and societal significance and must be answered to improve our educational systems. The current project develops a unified account of the role of context in episodic memory, addressing both questions. This account proposes that elaboration, transfer-appropriate processing, and pattern separation (via hippocampal coding) have cognitive and neural mechanisms in common whose identification will both transform our understanding of long-term memory and lead to new strategies for learning. The objectives of the proposed project are to: 1) investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms of transfer-appropriate processing from a new perspective: as it relates to context and hippocampal activation patterns, 2) test the prediction, derived from cognitive studies of elaborative rehearsal, that variability in context and hippocampal activation patterns improves retrieval, and 3) test the prediction, derived from animal studies of the hippocampus, that pattern separation of similar events increases context resolution and cue specificity. The ideas in this project, along with existing findings, will be taught to incoming university students who are the first in their family to attend college or who are from underserved populations and may not previously have been taught effective strategies for independent learning. The goal of this outreach is to increase confidence and success in college for these students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.