Functional heterogeneity in parietal cortex during episodic memory retrieval
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The memory for specific events and instances in time—episodic memory—is a central aspect of human cognition. It has long been thought that episodic memory is supported by a distributed network of regions in the brain, including frontal cortex and the medial temporal lobes. A growing body of neuroimaging evidence in the last several years has additionally suggested posterior parietal cortex (PPC) involvement during episodic retrieval. Several accounts have argued that the region's involvement reflects the engagement of two specific attentional processes, goal-driven and reflexive attention, distinctly residing in dorsal and ventral regions of PPC, respectively. Strict interpretations of such accounts, however, have recently been called into question, as attention- and memory-related processes might not occupy overlapping subregions of PPC. The research described here systematically assesses the anatomical and functional relationship between attention- and memory-related operations in PPC in a series of three experiments. The first experiment revealed four distinct patterns of activity across left lateral PPC—two thought to relate to mnemonic processes and two thought to relate to attention engaged during retrieval. The second experiment directly tested whether a region thought to index attention during retrieval from the first experiment was recruited in an independent attention task, with results suggesting that attention-sensitive regions are indeed engaged in a systematic manner during retrieval. The final experiment further probed the interaction between memory, attention, and decision-making processes engaged during retrieval, and replicated and extended the findings from the first experiment. Collectively, the findings from the research provide a more detailed depiction of how anatomically and functionally separable regions of PPC support distinct mechanisms of memory and attention.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Hutchinson, John Benjamin |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Psychology |
| Primary advisor | Wagner, Anthony David |
| Thesis advisor | Wagner, Anthony David |
| Thesis advisor | McClelland, James L |
| Thesis advisor | McClure, Samuel M |
| Advisor | McClelland, James L |
| Advisor | McClure, Samuel M |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | J. Benjamin Hutchinson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Psychology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2011. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by John Benjamin Hutchinson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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