| Project Detail |
A fundamental property of episodic memory (memory for our personal experiences) is that it is composed of distinct events – ‘got dressed, had breakfast, cycled to work’. But what are these events – how are they formed, encoded and represented in memory? Classic theories of episodic memory focus on the representation of static events, viewed as sets of associations between elements (e.g. ‘John’+‘coffee’+‘kitchen’). Yet there is no comprehensive theory that accounts for encoding and representation of dynamic events (‘John entered the kitchen, poured water over freshly-ground coffee and waited for it to brew’). The MEME project puts forward a new framework that builds on these classic models, but introduces the dimension of time – proposing an account of how dynamic events are segmented, encoded, and represented. Three work packages are designed to test predictions made by each component of the framework, to address the following questions: (1) Segmentation: During continuous experience, what determines that one event is over and a new one has begun? (2) Encoding: Do we encode experience to memory moment-by-moment or event-by-event (in ‘chunks’)? (3) Representation: Once encoded, how are dynamic events represented in the brain? MEME tackles these questions using a combination of innovative experimental designs (including a large-scale mobile game and tailored films created using ‘The Sims’), functional MRI and intracranial recordings. The stimuli crafted for the project, together with an analysis approach supporting identification of temporal dynamics in fMRI, will make it possible to reveal the basic information unit (“byte”) of episodic memory storage. Only by identifying this basic unit will we be able to reach a comprehensive understanding of real-life episodic memory and its disorders. The impact of MEME will go beyond the realm of memory research, because events are the ‘fundamental units of experience’ that affect all our interaction with the world. |
