Understanding the Contributions of the Hippocampus

The hippocampus plays an important role in human memory, with its anterior portion contributing to coarse-grained representations and its posterior portion contributing to fine-grained ones (Poppenk et al., 2013). My USRA project is focused on understanding the role of the hippocampus in a potential third type of memory representation; a general synthesis of stimuli. Beyond memory, the hippocampus has also been hypothesize to influence clinical disorders. For instance, preliminary research in our lab has found meta-cognitive memory abilities to be organized into factors resembling clinical disorders, when organized by variance in brain structure. My USRA project also aims to understand the contribution of the hippocampus to clinical disorders. My role in this project has been to develop administrative and experimental structure for the protocol, which involves extensive testing. Participants will complete approximately 27 hours of memory tasks, designed to evaluate the nature of their memory, and whether it is oriented towards detail, gist, or a synthesis of all stimuli. To do so, I have developed an extensive task of reading and evaluating reviews, as well as a recall task of lab-generated stories. Participants will also complete approximately 3-4 hours of online questionnaires, administered through Qualtrics. Over the summer, I conducted research to identify validated questionnaires that assess metacognitive abilities, in the domains of memory, attention, language, motor control, social cognition and perception. Results on these questionnaires will be used to validate preliminary findings on the relationship between metacognitive memory, brain variance and sub-threshold levels of clinical disorders, and to investigate whether these findings expand to other forms of metacognition. Finally, participants will complete a number of structural and functional MRI scans (including DTI). This work may help us understand the pure science of the function of human memory, as well as the nature of clinical disorders.