The proposed research aims to further our understanding of how episodic (contextually-mediated) memories are encoded and subsequently recalled. To study this, I will analyze intracranial recordings from epileptic neurosurgical patients undergoing clinical monitoring for seizures as they perform a variant of the free recall paradigm. In this paradigm, patients study a list of words during an encoding phase and recall the words in any order they wish during a recall phase. Although patients are free to recall the words in any order, an extensive body of literature has identified a number of recurring patterns in the sequences of recalls people end to make. These patterns are thought to reflect fundamental mechanisms underlying encoding and recall, and have led to the creation of a wide variety of mathematical models aimed at explaining those mechanisms. Many of these models assume the existence of a neural representation of the context in which words are studied. Context-based models assume that a context representation (a) becomes associated with each studied word and (b) is used to probe memory during the recall process. This research is designed to directly test the fundamental assumptions of context-based models, and will serve as an important bridge between the behavioral modeling and electrophysiology literatures. Relevance of this research to public health: My research will benefit clinical research in two ways. First, one goal of my research is to study the distributed representations of memory-related cognitive processes in epilepsy patients (i.e., functional cognitive maps). Functional mapping plays a critical role in the successful Dost-surgical outcome of the patients. Second, one of the most prominent debilitating effects of Alzheimer's Disease is a decreased ability to encode episodic memories. Episodic memory is also impaired in anterograde amnesia and in normal aging. A better understanding of the neural basis of the encoding and recall of episodic memories may lead to the developments of more effective treatments of episodic memory impairment.
| Manning, Jeremy R; Lew, Timothy F; Li, Ningcheng et al. (2014) MAGELLAN: a cognitive map-based model of human wayfinding. J Exp Psychol Gen 143:1314-30 |
| Manning, Jeremy R; Sperling, Michael R; Sharan, Ashwini et al. (2012) Spontaneously reactivated patterns in frontal and temporal lobe predict semantic clustering during memory search. J Neurosci 32:8871-8 |
| Manning, Jeremy R; Kahana, Michael J (2012) Interpreting semantic clustering effects in free recall. Memory 20:511-7 |
| Manning, Jeremy R; Polyn, Sean M; Baltuch, Gordon H et al. (2011) Oscillatory patterns in temporal lobe reveal context reinstatement during memory search. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 108:12893-7 |
