Memory, Space, and Time Workshop

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Memories make us who we are. They serve as repositories of all kinds of information from our daily lives, from mundane details to extravagant theories and personal musings. This information isn’t randomly loaded into a storage unit as happens in a desktop computer. Instead, our memory system structures the incoming information. Researchers have long suspected that memories of the same space might be stored together or linked in some way. Others have suggested the same thing for time, that we might have a special temporal index that organizes what we’ve experienced. Some have proposed that our memory systems include special brain cells, or networks of cells, dedicated to encoding spatial and/or temporal information. Similar questions can be asked concerning how memory evolved in vertebrates and other animals. How did memory come to work the way it does? Did it emerge from a system initially involved in navigating space or tracking the flow of time? Do space and time have the same status in structuring memory or is one more fundamental? Answers to these basic scientific issues will enhance understanding of memory disorders and guide interventions to improve memory and ameliorate memory decline. The workshop on Memory, Space, and Time will take place in Tucson, Arizona, with a multi-disciplinary group of speakers from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as local contributors from the sciences and humanities. Selected graduate student scholars working in related areas will receive travel stipends. This workshop will initiate a collaboration on a volume or journal special issue, to be released in open access form following the conference. 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.