BIO

Kelly Kennedy is a sophomore at FSU majoring in Behavioral Neuroscience and minoring in computer science. She is currently conducting research in the field of memory. She hopes to continue research in this area to receive her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience. Kelly would like to thank Dr. Martin and Stefani Morgan for their continued support and expertise!

Effects of Re-exposure on Memory Retrieval and Representational Changes

Abstract

The opportunity to re-experience an event has been shown to increase detail rich
memory for the event, as seen in a study investigating aging adults and memory
performance. However, the question remains as to how to best optimize the re￾exposure to the event. Using naturalistic stimuli, scenes from the TV show Seinfeld, we
created four “replay” conditions. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
to determine how replay type influences representational change in the brain.
Participants encoded scenes from the show that were spliced together to fit our
manipulations of interest. Then, they replayed these scenes over four days. The
experiment was a total of eight days, which concluded with an fMRI scanning task and a
verbal recall session on the final two days. We hypothesized that scenes played
together in the same order, structured replay type, will facilitate representational change
in the direction of integration in the hippocampus, while scenes that are played in a
random order, unstructured replay type, will facilitate representational change in the
direction of separation in the hippocampus. Representational similarity analyses will be
conducted to investigate this hypothesis. We will also be conducting behavioral
analyses on the participants’ recall transcripts. We anticipate that we will find more
detail rich recall in the narrative replay type than in the non-narrative replay type.

Keywords: neuroscience, memory, behavior