From Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Dinamics on memory formation

will present the talk titled

Boundary integration contributes to better performance during goal directed behavior

Abstract

From birth, we are driven by the urge to understand the world around us. One way to do so is to break things up into parts or events. These representations of states of the world allow us to make sense of what we just experienced, anticipate the future, and more effectively store information in our memory systems. In my PhD project I will test the existence of a general cognitive and neural mechanism associated to the identification of segmentation boundaries. Boundaries can be conceptualized by moments in time by which our brain guides the process of integrating external and internal representations. Such dynamic interaction may encompass neural mechanisms that may have consequences beyond learning and memory, such as in decision making. To explore the later, we have implemented a task design in which participants are required to form a mental representation of the relative distance between a series of fractal images that are connected in a map, and their boundaries in their environment. Participants are requested to learn and find the optimal paths between pairs of pictures separated by several other pictures within the map, to be rewarded. Unbeknownst to the participant, these picture sequences and paths form clusters or ‘communities’ of mutually predicting stimuli, thereby eliciting the emergence of hierarchical memory representations for picture images, those that link between communities (i.e., boundaries) and those that not. In the current talk, I will present behavioral results from healthy participants who performed the experiment online and some preliminary results with epileptic patients.

Location: Online (Microsoft Teams). Click here to join the meeting