Despite their severely impaired episodic memory, individuals with amnesia are able to comprehend ongoing events. Online representations of a current event are thought to be supported by a network of regions centred on the posterior midline cortex (PMC). By contrast, episodic memory is widely believed to be supported by interactions between the hippocampus and these cortical regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen we remember an event, the content of that memory is represented across the brain. Detailed memory retrieval is thought to involve the reinstatement of those representations. Functional MRI combined with representational similarity analyses (RSA) of spatial patterns of brain activity has revealed reinstatement of recently-experienced events throughout a core memory retrieval network.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEveryday experience requires rapid and automatic integration of incoming stimuli with previously stored knowledge. Prior knowledge can help to construct a general "situation model" of the event, as well as aid comprehension of an ongoing narrative. Using fMRI in healthy adult humans, we investigated processing of videos whose locations and characters were always familiar but whose narratives were either a continuation or noncontinuation of an earlier video (high context (HC) or low context (LC), respectively).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAssociative memory is essential to everyday activities, such as the binding of faces and corresponding names to form single bits of information. However, this ability often becomes impaired with increasing age. The most important neural substrate of associative memory is the hippocampus, a structure crucially implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe crucial role of lateral parietal regions in episodic memory has been confirmed in previous studies. While aging has an influence on retrieval of episodic memory, it remains to be examined how the involvement of lateral parietal regions in episodic memory changes with age. We investigated episodic memory retrieval in two age groups, using faces as stimuli and retrieval success as a measure of episodic memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF