Brittany M. Jeye - PDF document

Brittany M. Jeye Department of Psychol
Brittany M. Jeye Department of Psychology Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Phone: 617-552-9247 E-mail address: jeye@bc.edu Background I am a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience who studies human visual long-term memory. More specifically, I investigate the behavioral and brain processes that support both how detailed our memories are and how and why we forget. My research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Research on Memory and Forgetting The human brain is capable of remembering massive amounts of visual information over long periods of time. However, several fundamental questions about visual long-term memory remain: How detailed are these memory representations and how does the brain code for these detailed memories? The majority of research on long-term memory has only investigated the brain regions that support when you can accurately recall memories (for example, correctly remembering what side of the parking lot you parked your car this morning). However, there is recent evidence that long-term memory also involves active inhibition of potentially distracting information (e.g., suppressing the memory of what side of the parking lot you parked your car yesterday, which is not relevant when locating your car today). That is, under some circumstances, such as if memories are irrelevant, distracting, or unpleasant, inhibitory processes can suppress memories, allowing us to forget outdated information. Most of the time, these inhibitory processes work without us even being aware of them, helping us to remove unnecessary or unwanted memories from our mind, similar to invisible background processes running in a computer. The Role of Inhibition In my research, I investigate what regions of the brain are involved in these inhibitory processes during long-term memory. My work primarily focuses on the roles of the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped region in the inner middle part of the brain associated with conscious long-term memory, and the prefrontal cortex, the front-most region of the brain associated with control of memory retrieval. The role of the hippocampus is well understood, as this region binds a previously experienced item (e.g., your car) with its contextual information (e.g., its location in a parking lot). However, the role of the prefrontal cortex during long-term memory inhibition is largely unknown. I have found that different regions of the prefrontal cortex are involved when you consciously inhibit or suppress a memory, but other prefrontal regions are involved when memories are suppressed unconsciously. Currently, I am investigating whether these different regions of the prefrontal cortex interact with the hippocampus in similar or distinct ways to support our long-term memories using noninvasive brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Necessity of Research on Memory Many patients, such as those with dementia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury, have severe memory impairments due to disruption in prefrontal – hippocampal processing that hinders their ability to inhibit learned responses. Thus, these findings will help determine the nature of the inhibitory processing and how it supports long-term memory, and it can provide important insights into such brain disorders. For example, if different regions of the prefrontal cortex interact with the hippocampus in distinct ways, it could inform potential new interventions for these disorders.