Imagine that you lacked autobiographical memory and could not recall what you did this morning or how you got to the room you are in now. It would certainly be difficult to organize your life and meet your obligations. Yet this is the situation faced by certain amnesic humans with damage to the temporal lobes of their brain. It is also the condition in which many scientists believe nonhuman animals exist; they are mentally "stuck" forever in the present. Studies of human amnesics have dramatically revealed the fact that apparently seamless human memory actually consists of distinct systems. Each memory system is specialized to process different information including habits and skills, general factual knowledge, and first-person autobiographical information. For example, human episodic memories are rich in contextual details that specify their source, or the occasion on which they were formed. One might experience detailed recollection of the smell of freshly mown grass as you talked to a well-dressed but unshaven young man at a wedding last August. By contrast, semantic memories lack contextual details. You know dogs have tails, but probably do not remember details of the occasion on which you learned this fact. The distinction between episodic and semantic memory in humans is central in cognitive neuroscience and has been established by the combination of behavioral studies, neuroimaging studies, and studies of patients with brain damage. In contrast, we know little about the extent to which these memory systems exist in nonhuman animals. Indeed many cognitive scientists argue that episodic memory may be uniquely human. It is impossible to evaluate this claim, or to develop appropriate animal models for the study of memory, without appropriate behavioral tests. With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Robert Hampton and his students at Emory University will develop new memory tests capable of measuring aspects of episodic memory in nonhuman animals. Specifically, Dr. Hampton will develop tests to investigate whether subjects remember the source of their memories and whether they can recall as well as recognize previously experienced images. Performance on these tests will be contrasted with other memory performance and the brain basis for these types of memory will be determined. Development of these new cognitive tests, and training young scientists to use them, will enable future work on cognition and the biological mechanisms that underlie it.
In addition to advancing our understanding of memory and cognition in an important model of human cognition, this project will also have broader impacts in a number of ways: 1) Graduate students, including a large percentage of female students, are centrally involved in the research and share their enthusiasm for neuroscience through visits to high schools during events such as Brain Awareness Week. 2) Each summer, at least one student from the BRAIN program, which recruits undergraduates from groups underrepresented in science, will work on the proposed projects. 3) Undergraduate students from Dr. Hampton's introductory psychology class are recruited annually to work in the lab through research experience programs funded by Emory College. 4) Dr. Hampton and graduate students will perform docent activities at a cognition exhibit at Zoo Atlanta, thus conveying the content and excitement of their work to the public. 5) Dr. Hampton and his lab will share their findings through expansion of their existing website, which is aimed at an undergraduate level audience. One of the goals of the website is to aid in the recruitment of graduating students to neurocognitive research.
Imagine that you lacked autobiographical memory and could not recall what you did this morning or how you got to the room you are in now. It would certainly be difficult to organize your life and meet your obligations. Yet this is the situation faced by certain amnesic humans with damage to the temporal lobes of their brain. It is also the condition in which many scientists believe animals exist; they are "stuck" forever in the present. Understanding this type of memory, often called episodic memory because it records information about personal episodes, is critical for understanding the evolution of cognition and memory generally and for advancing human mental health. The scientific goal of this work was to advance the study of memory for events in animals to improve our understanding of how this type of memory works and provide better models for biomedical research. We successfully developed several new techniques for measuring memory in animals including tests of image recognition, memory for the order in which events occurred, and tests of the ability to "bring to mind" information that is not currently present. We published the results of this work in top journals in our field including Current Biology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Animal Cognition, Journal of Comparative Psychology, and Behavioral Processes. We presented our findings at international conferences held both in the United States and overseas, for example in Spain, Belgium, and India. Our work has also developed human resources relevant to the advancement of science. Two graduate students who worked on this project have taken tenure track professorships in the United States and one took a research postdoc at the National Institutes of health. 17 undergraduates have worked on the project, and about a third of these students are from groups underrepresented in science. Many of these students have gone on to medical school, graduate school, or jobs with companies such as Raytheon. Finally, our work has brought understanding of neuroscience research to the public through work we do at Zoo Atlanta involving demonstration of cognitive testing for the public, and publication of articles in the press about our working in outlets such as The Washington Post, New York Times, Wired, and New Scientist. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
