Brain meeting: Clive Rosenthal

Brain meeting

Learning and recognition of conscious and non-conscious events

Interactions between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex support the learning, stabilisation (consolidation), and retrieval of events that are available to conscious perception. In this talk, task and resting-state fMRI and behavioural studies investigating the learning and recognition of conscious and non-conscious events will be presented. Results implicate regions as early as human primary visual cortex (V1) in learning, consolidation, and recognition memory for non-conscious events. Early brain regions can thus support cognitive operations classically ascribed to later brain regions, without modulation due to top-down attention or signals related to conscious error and novelty detection, search, and prediction. Companion experimental work is presented based on a group of individuals (N=18) with highly selective bilateral damage to the human hippocampal cornu ammonis 3 (CA3) – a subregion widely agreed to support event (episodic) memory encoding and retrieval – and an associated loss of integration (average path length) across the medial temporal lobe subsystem of the default network. Although rodent studies implicate CA3 in recent, but not remote, episodic memory, the results indicate human CA3 is necessary for episodic retrieval long after initial acquisition, whereas recognition memory is preserved for single events and for sequential events that require integration across location and time. The implications of these studies for prevailing neurobiological accounts of how experiences are initially encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved will be considered.

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