Tag: Lea Frank

Spatial Location and Memory Integration

Presenter: Dahlia Mohd Razif – Business Administration, Human Physiology, Neuroscience, Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Lea Frank, Dasa Zeithamova

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

Memory is flexible and can be influenced by other items or events that we have encountered. Memory integration refers to the concept that related memories are stored in the brain as overlapping representations which form a memory link that allow us to make new inferences or extract related information. Studies have shown that memory integration is enhanced by time proximity when items or events occur within a close time frame but not much is known regarding how spatial positioning affects memory integration. 160 participants will be split into a spatial overlapping condition and a no spatial overlapping condition. This experiment consists of a study trial, an associative inference test and an associative memory test. During the study trial, participants will be presented with object images positioned relative to base object images. For the associative inference test and memory test, object images will be presented as cues to evaluate the extent that participants can integrate the associations that share the common element of the base object as well as remember presented pairs during the study trial. As the date of submission of this abstract is prior to data collection, conclusions have not been realized. We hypothesize that spatial overlapping of items will result in diminished memory integration due to interference. This research can help deepen our understanding of how the brain encodes separate items and creates an integrated representation of the shared information.

Memory specificity and generalization: Competing or complementary memory processes?

Presenter(s): Celina Maldonado—Psychology and Linguistics

Faculty Mentor(s): Lea Frank, Dasa Zeithamova

Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation

Memory serves two important functions: we must remember individual experiences (memory specificity) and we must be able to link across these experiences to form general concepts (generalization) . It is unclear, however, whether generalization and memory specificity are competing or complementary processes . One possibility is that individual memories are stored in detail and then generalized during retrieval . In this case, successful generalization relies on intact memory for the individual memories . Another possibility is that memories are linked to previous experiences during encoding, leading to some of the information of individual experiences being lost to support generalization . In this experiment, two tasks were used to study memory specificity and generalization . To investigate memory specificity, participants studied a series of colored objects . The test phase required participants to select the color of each object from a continuous color wheel, allowing us to measure how precisely they could remember the color-object pair . To measure generalization, participants studied face-scene pairings in which two faces were paired with a given scene (F1-S1, F2-S1), and one of the faces was also paired with a second scene (F2-S2) . Generalization was measured by how often participants linked the second face with the second scene (F2-S2) at test given the faces’ shared preference for the first scene . To understand the relationship between memory specificity and generalization, we correlated performance on the two independent tasks . If generalization relies on intact memory for individual experiences, then I predict performance on generalization and memory specificity will be positively correlated .

Distinct representations of perceived and remembered information in parietal and ventral temporal cortices

Presenter(s): Rennie Kendrick—Biology

Faculty Mentor(s): Dasa Zeithamova, Lea Frank

Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation

Both the parietal and ventral temporal cortices (VTC) have been implicated in representing externally perceived information and information retrieved from memory . However, while the VTC represents visual features of stimuli, it is believed the parietal cortex represents conceptual features . In this study, a pattern classifier was trained on participants’ neural data from VTC or parietal cortex across two tasks (encoding and recall), and we assessed the classifier’s ability to decode category membership of objects and scenes perceived (encoding) or remembered (recall) . We predicted that the unique roles of VTC and parietal cortex would translate to differences in which task resulted in highest classification accuracy: we predicted that classification accuracy during perception will be higher in VTC, while recall will be higher in parietal cortex . Our results partially confirmed this hypothesis: although the classifier had higher accuracy when considering perception relative to recall data in both parietal cortex and VTC, the difference in accuracy between perception and recall data was significantly larger when considering VTC neural data . The classification accuracy results suggest that losing perceived information of stimuli from perception to recall has a smaller effect on the classifier’s ability to decode category membership in parietal cortex than in VTC . Thus, neural representations in parietal cortex at encoding may reflect non-visual features (e .g . conceptual information) that are later retrieved .

Augemented Reality Effects on Mood, Stress & Cognition

Presenter(s): Ray Jackson—Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Dasa Zeithamova-Demircan, Lea Frank

Session 6: Cerebal Matters

Research with Virtual Reality has shown that a brief meditation experience is effective in reducing feelings of stress and anxiety (Keller, Bunnell, Kim & Rothbaum 2017) . When combined with interactive biometric feedback (for example: one’s heart rate) these same interventions have a stronger effect on both subjective feeling states as well as physiological changes associated with a relaxation response (Jester, Rozek, & McKelley 2019) . While it has been previously shown that reductions in stress can facilitate improved performance on cognitive tasks (Wu & Yan 2019), no research to date has specifically examined the ability of a brief Augmented Reality based meditation experience to boost cognitive performance . Our aim was to investigate if an AR-based meditation experience can stimulate a temporary boost in cognition by way of lowering stress, and to examine any additional effects of an addition of biometric feedback .