Cognition Workshop 12/2: Dr. Nicole Long

“I’m in an encoding state of mind”: Neural mechanisms of memory formation

How do we successfully form new memories? A classic approach to assessing memory formation is the comparison of activity patterns during the study of items that will later be remembered compared to the study of items that will later be forgotten — a contrast dubbed the subsequent memory effect (SME). Although this approach has been fruitful, there are many reasons why we may forget, meaning that the SME contrast is a coarse assay of memory formation. Here we use alternative approaches in which we refine the SME contrast and investigate the role of mnemonic states in memory formation. We record scalp EEG or fMRI while participants perform memory tasks and use a combination of univariate and multivariate approaches to assess successful memory formation. We find that neural SME signals reflect memory organization processes and that mnemonic states, estimated through multivariate analysis methods, may be better predictors of subsequent memory than traditional univariate signals. A central goal of our future work is to identify the factors that induce mnemonic states and to link the engagement of mnemonic states to performance across cognitive tasks.

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