Both of these ongoing lines of work are related to how an individual memory (or several memories from a session) are initially coded during the experience and become strengthened through offline replay mechanisms. An important function of the memory system, however, is to encode aspects of our experiences that are novel or break our prior expectations. In this way, the ability to encode details of our daily lives serves to identify when updating of our knowledge is needed and to support knowledge updating. We have examined this process by hypothesizing that cortical regions come to represent the statistical regularities or overlapping features in similar, overlapping neural ensembles. Using tightly controlled experimental stimuli and scanning participants during immediate retrieval and delayed retrieval, we can track the consolidation dependent emergence of overlapping memory representations in the medial PFC. We have extended this work to understand when these more schematic representations emerge during learning, what kinds of features different brain regions integrate and what are the behavioral consequences of neural overlap in distinct regions. So far, we have evidence that neural representational overlap in the medial PFC is related to measures of the automatic activation (as measured by unconscious priming measures) of those memories.
Collaborators
This project is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Donald Goff at the NYU School of Medicine and the Shanghai Mental Health Center.
