Modulation of the neural representation of autobiographical memories through rehearsal
Welcome to my poster!
I am an undergraduate student at McGill University in the Honours Psychology program. My research looks at the effect of rehearsal on the neural representation of autobiographical memories.
To view my presentation, click on the 'Presentation' button below my picture.
Come by next Tuesday from 3:30pm until 4:45pm to discuss and ask questions about my project! You can reach me using the Microsoft Teams link below or via email by clicking on the 'email author' button below.
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Modulation of the neural representation of autobiographical memories through rehearsal
Autobiographical memories – memories of past personal events – are reconstructed at retrieval. Important to this reconstructive process is the hippocampus that has the critical role of bringing together the details associated with a specific memory. Research has proposed that the anterior and posterior hippocampus serve different functions such that the anterior hippocampus supports the initial reconstruction of a mental representation of a memory whereas the posterior hippocampus supports retrieving specific details associated with a memory. Past work has shown that factors such as rehearsal can alter the neural representation of memories with decreases in activity described after repeated presentation of a stimulus. Although this effect has been found with episodic memory, there is less evidence for this effect with autobiographical memory. To address this, we reanalyzed neuroimaging data by Gurguryan & Sheldon (2019) in which participants (N=24) recalled twelve autobiographical memories, four times each. We took a region of interest approach and extracted beta weights from the anterior and posterior hippocampus, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Our results indicated that activity in the bilateral anterior but not posterior hippocampi, the VMPFC, nor the PCC decreased as a function of repetition. The differential patterns of activity found for the anterior and posterior hippocampi supports the idea that the anterior hippocampus is critical for the construction of autobiographical memories. We conclude that these results provide evidence that the effect of rehearsal on neural activity was due to lowered reconstructive demands of the autobiographical memory retrieval task.