The role of the medial temporal lobe in memory, perception and emotion: The promiscuous hippocampus
Dr. Andrew Yonelinas, University of California, Davis
Monday, February 5 at 5:30 p.m., 118 Psychology
Abstract
Our ability to remember the important events that make up our lives is critically dependent on the medial temporal lobe (MTL). More recent work, however, has suggested that different subregions within the MTL support distinct mnemonic processes and that they play important roles in cognitive tasks beyond traditional tests of long term episodic memory. I will describe work showing that the hippocampus plays a central role in binding together and subsequently recollecting the different aspects that make up an episode or event, whereas other regions such as the perirhinal cortex can support familiarity-based memory discriminations even when recollection fails. In addition, I present evidence that the hippocampus is involved in supporting short-term memory and even visual perception, when those tasks involve high-resolution or complex bindings. I will then focus in the unique role of emotion in episodic memory and show that the amygdala supports recollection of emotional bindings that exhibit relatively slow forgetting compared to hippocampal bindings. Finally, I will examine the effects of acute stress on different MTL regions and present data showing that post-encoding stress can rescue memory from the effects of forgetting by acting as a mnemonic filter.
Suggested Reading
Yonelinas, A. P. (2013). The hippocampus supports high-resolution binding in the service of perception, working memory and long-term memory. Behavioural Brain Research, 254: 34-44. [pdf]
Yonelinas, A. P., & Ritchey, M. (in press). The slow forgetting of emotional episodic memories: an emotional binding account. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.02.009 [pdf]