Brain meeting: Daniel Barry

Brain meeting 

The mental construction of both personally-experienced events and novel scenarios recruits the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. As memories age, they become increasingly dependent upon the prefrontal cortex. This talk will first demonstrate the temporal profile of this recruitment by using high-resolution fMRI to detect the neural representations of real-world autobiographical memories. Memory retrieval is supported by functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Using MEG, I will show evidence that a similar interplay exists during the imagination of novel scenes. I will then present a novel perspective on the role of the hippocampus in memory retrieval which accommodates its role in other cognitive functions such as imagination. Finally, I will present new data revealing an association between hippocampal subregion size and individual differences in memory reconstruction ability. In summary, the mental construction of events by the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex is a highly dynamic process which evolves over time

There will be coffee, tea and cake in the conservatory directly after the talk.