This project investigates confidence and accuracy in memory using eye tracking methods combined with functional and structural neuroimaging methods. It is our confidence in our memory that motivates and guides our actions and behavior. The importance of subjective memory confidence can be seen most dramatically in cases when confidence and accuracy dissociate, such as in the case of mistaken eyewitness identifications. Confidence-accuracy dissociations in memory are also important from a public health perspective and have implications for medication adherence and compensation for cognitive deficits. Furthermore, confidence-accuracy dissociations in memory may be relatively common in normal and pathological aging. Some studies have shown that eye movements are a good indicator of veridical memory even in the absence of awareness, but other studies have not shown this effect.
The first aim of this project is, therefore, to examine the influence of subjective confidence and veridical memory on viewing behavior. The first set of experiments compares viewing behavior for true and false confident memories.
The second aim i s to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine which brain regions support confidence and accuracy in memory, and to use eye movement based memory effects as an indirect measure of veridical memory and memory confidence. The next aim is to examine how the influence of confidence and accuracy on eye movements changes with age-related alterations in hippocampal volume and white matter integrity. In this experiment older adults participate in a false memory paradigm while their eye movements are tracked. The eye tracking and behavioral results will then be correlated with hippocampal volume and white matter integrity. Understanding the influence of neural activity, memory accuracy, and subjective experience on viewing behavior may have particular clinical utility. If eye movements based memory effects are robust despite a lack of awareness, eye tracking could be a valuable tool to measure spared memory function in clinical populations (e.g., Alzheimer's Disease) that may have trouble making overt responses, remembering instructions, and staying on task. Furthermore, integrating eye tracking and brain scanning methods may be useful in characterizing the functional deficits and the neural bases of these deficits in clinical populations, and may provide critical information about how to make use of any spared memory function.
This project investigates eye movement based markers of confidence and accuracy in memory, and the brain regions that mediate confidence and accuracy in memory. Understanding confidence-accuracy dissociations in memory are important from a public health perspective because they have implications for medication adherence and the ability to compensate for cognitive deficits. Determining markers for confidence and accuracy may be useful for diagnosis and developing interventions of specific memory deficits.
| Chua, Elizabeth F; Hannula, Deborah E; Ranganath, Charan (2012) Distinguishing highly confident accurate and inaccurate memory: insights about relevant and irrelevant influences on memory confidence. Memory 20:48-62 |
