BIO

Hello! My name is Patrick Tootle and I am undergraduate student here at FSU, working on my major in psychology and minor in women’s studies. My research interests include OCD, cognitive neuroscience and clinical research pertaining to sexual and gender minorities.

Effects of Re-exposure on Memory Retrieval and Representational Neural 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: memory, retrieval, narrative