Cognitive Neuroscience Of Memory Research Articles

Sounds of Healthy Aging: Assessing Everyday Cognitive Activity From Real-Life Audio Data

The healthy aging model of the World Health Organization (2015) highlights the value of assessing and monitoring everyday activities in understanding health in old age. This symposium includes four studies that used the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), a portable recording device that periodically collects sound snippets in everyday life, to assess various real-life cognitive activities in the context of healthy aging. The four studies collected over 100,000 sound snippets (30-seconds long) over a few days from young and older adults in the US and Switzerland. Participants’ speech in the sound snippets were transcribed and coded for different cognitive activity information. Specifically, Haas and Kliegel have investigated the “prospective memory paradox” by examining the commonality and differences in utterances about retrospective and prospective memory failure in young and older adults’ everyday conversations. Demiray and colleagues investigated the relation between autobiographical memory functions and conversation types in young and older adults in relation to well-being. Luo and colleagues have identified the compensatory function of real-world contexts in cognitive aging: Their study showed that older adults benefited from talking with their spouse in producing complex grammatical structures. Finally, Polsinelli and colleagues found robust associations between language markers (e.g., prepositions, more numbers) and executive functions, highlighting the potential use of spontaneous speech in predicting cognitive status in healthy older adults. Finally, Prof. Matthew Grilli will serve as a discussant and provide an integrative discussion of the papers, informed by his extensive work on clinical and cognitive neuroscience of memory in relation to real-life contexts.

Sleep Supports Memory and Learning: Implications for Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology.

Purpose This tutorial aims to draw attention to the interactions among memory, sleep, and therapy potential and to increase awareness and knowledge in the field of speech-language pathology of the potential impact of sleep as a mediating or moderating factor in promoting therapeutic outcome. Method We highlight key findings from the literature on the cognitive neuroscience of memory, the neurophysiology of sleep, how sleep supports memory, and how sleep disruption affects memory and learning abilities in populations commonly served in speech-language pathology. Results Research increasingly points to the critical importance of sleep quality and quantity to memory and learning, and sleep disruption is linked to deficits in functional cognition that may limit our clients' ability to benefit from speech pathology interventions. Conclusions As a field dedicated to promoting memory, learning, and relearning through our interventions, any systemic factors that affect these abilities demand our attention. Although speech-language pathologists do not treat sleep disturbance, we play a critical role in recognizing the signs and symptoms of sleep disturbance and making appropriate referrals, as undiagnosed and untreated sleep disturbance can have serious impacts on success in therapeutic contexts. By considering how related factors affect memory and learning, we have the opportunity to take a whole client approach to maximizing our clients' therapy potential and functional progress.

The cognitive neuroscience of memory

The cognitive neuroscience of long-term memory is ingrained with the assumptions that a particular task measures a single cognitive process and that each cognitive process is mediated by a single brain region. However, these assumptions are simplistic and hindering progress toward understanding the true mechanisms of memory. This special issue of Cognitive Neuroscience presents five empirical papers and two theoretical discussion papers with peer commentaries on the spatial and/or temporal mechanisms of memory. Using fMRI, Yu et al. show ventral parietal cortex sub-regions mediate dissociable aspects of recollection, and Mickley Steinmetz et al. study time-delay effects on processes engaged during emotional versus neutral item encoding. Employing ERPs, Galli et al. investigate anticipatory activity and recall, and Evans et al. study the effect of cognitive demands on recollection activity. Using fMRI and ERPs, Herzmann et al. investigate spatial-temporal activity associated with recognition. Voss et al. review electrophysiological, fMRI, and behavioral evidence indicating implicit memory can influence explicit memory measures. Gotts et al. review electrophysiological, fMRI, and modeling evidence to evaluate proposals of repetition priming and highlight neural synchronization. These papers embrace complex cognitive and neural processes, and thus will provide a framework for future studies to investigate the mechanisms of memory.

Memory systems.

The idea that there are multiple memory systems can be traced to early philosophical considerations and introspection. However, the early experimental work considered memory a unitary phenomenon and focused on finding the mechanism upon which memory is based. A full reconciliation of debates about that mechanism, and a coincidental rediscovery of the idea of multiple memory systems, emerged from studies in the cognitive neuroscience of memory. This research has identified three major forms of memory that have distinct operating principles and are supported by different brain systems. These include: (1) a cortical-hippocampal circuit that mediates declarative memory, our capacity to recollect facts and events; (2) procedural memory subsystems involving a cortical-striatal circuit that mediates habit formation and a brainstem-cerebellar circuit that mediates sensorimotor adaptations; and (3) a circuit involving subcortical and cortical pathways through the amygdala that mediates the attachment of affective status and emotional responses to previously neutral stimuli. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Motivation and Learning

Recent advances in the cognitive neuroscience of motivation and learning have demonstrated a critical role for midbrain dopamine and its targets in reward prediction. Converging evidence suggests that midbrain dopamine neurons signal a reward prediction error, allowing an organism to predict, and to act to increase, the probability of reward in the future. This view has been highly successful in accounting for a wide range of reinforcement learning phenomena in animals and humans. However, while current theories of midbrain dopamine provide a good account of behavior known as habitual or stimulus-response learning, we review evidence suggesting that other neural and cognitive processes are involved in motivated, goal-directed behavior. We discuss how this distinction resembles the classic distinction in the cognitive neuroscience of memory between nondeclarative and declarative memory systems, and discuss common themes between mnemonic and motivational functions. Finally, we present data demonstrating links between mnemonic processes and reinforcement learning. The past decade has seen a growth of interest in the cognitive neuroscience of motivation and reward. This is largely rooted in a series of neurophysiology studies of the response properties of dopamine-containing midbrain neurons in primates receiving reward (Schultz, 1998). The responses of these neurons were subsequently interpreted in terms of reinforcement learning, a computational framework for trial and error learning from reward (Houk, Adams, & Barto, 1995; Montague, Dayan, & Sejnowski, 1996; Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997). Together with

The cognitive neuroscience of memory

The cognitive neuroscience of memory

The cognitive neuroscience of memory: perspectives from neuroimaging research.

Cognitive neuroscience approaches to memory attempt to elucidate the brain processes and systems that are involved in different forms of memory and learning. This paper examines recent research from brain-damaged patients and neuroimaging studies that bears on the distinction between explicit and implicit forms of memory. Explicit memory refers to conscious recollection of previous experiences, whereas implicit memory refers to the non-conscious effects of past experiences on subsequent performance and behaviour. Converging evidence suggests that an implicit form of memory known as priming is associated with changes in posterior cortical regions that are involved in perceptual processing; some of the same regions may contribute to explicit memory. The hippocampal formation and prefrontal cortex also play important roles in explicit memory. Evidence is presented from recent PET scanning studies that suggests that frontal regions are associated with intentional strategic efforts to retrieve recent experiences, whereas the hippocampal formation is associated with some aspect of the actual recollection of an event.

The cognitive neuroscience of memory

The cognitive neuroscience of memory