Episodic memory stores our past experiences; we can remember not only episodes but also the order in which the episodes occurred. These memory abilities are critical to our lives, but they tend to decline as we age and are impaired in diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Developing an animal model of episodic memory and its replay may be crucial to understanding episodic memory function in humans. By using techniques currently available only in animals, the investigators will advance our knowledge of human memory. The investigators will also explore whether intensive, early, and sustained research experiences for undergraduate and high-school students, in particular those students from underrepresented groups, leads to an increase in STEM employment.
We will answer four questions. Do non-human animals have a rich representation of the flow of past events? Can they replay episodic memories after incidental encoding in an unexpected assessment of memory? Can they replay episodic memories forward and backward in time? Can they "remember to remember" episodic memories? Evidence of this type is critical to develop an animal model that recapitulates critical aspects of human episodic memory mechanisms to effectively use the causal techniques developed in animals to begin to provide insights about specific cognitive mechanisms that occur in people. The proposed work may have transformative effects in our understanding of human mechanisms of cognition by combining powerful techniques only available in animals with cutting-edge behavioral techniques that tap into cognitive mechanisms of the type focused on in humans, while being guided by theories and computational models of human cognition.
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.
