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Neurocognitive Determinants of Memory Enhancement

Abstract

The identification of neurocognitive correlates supporting enhanced memory has far reaching implications, from improving education and productivity to mitigating ailments caused by memory disorders. The work presented within this dissertation leverages behavioral paradigms, Virtual reality (VR), and neuroimaging tools to unveil the neural processes responsible for enhanced memory. The methodological tools used throughout this dissertation were drafted in an attempt to create an ecologically valid medium with theoretical extensions into education and rehabilitation. Of particular focus is how the parallel recruitment of reward and/or spatial processing systems during the encoding of information can serve to upregulate mnemonic processing and enhance memory. Specifically, Chapter 1 examines how memory-retrieval can be modulated by reward and whether individual differences in anatomical connectivity within reward processing and elaborative semantic encoding circuits, as measured with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), are associated with value-induced modulation of memory.

The remaining chapters focus on the use of VR to implement the Method of Loci (MoL), the world’s most ancient and effective mnemonic. Behavioral and neuroimaging analyses were designed to test a hypothesized mechanism of action behind the MoL’s efficacy: explicit binding of information to the spatial scaffolding of an environment recruits neural systems supporting the encoding of space, which bolsters recall breadth and strength. To test this hypothesis, the dissertation first reviews the literature and presents VR as a way to increase the ecological validity of fMRI memory research (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 then investigates how the MoL can be implemented within VR and reveals which facets of the technique are most responsible for its potent impact on human memory. Chapter 4 extends the work in Chapter 3 by evaluating virtual strategies for reusing the same environment when encoding multiple lists of information—a necessity when considering the time consuming nature of creating memorable virtual environments. Chapter 5 demonstrates how mental representations of virtual environments can be decoded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), setting the stage for an investigation into whether virtual encoding environments can be decoded during recall (the work conducted in Chapter 6).

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