Brain meeting: Ian Clark

Brain meeting

The hippocampus has been associated with a wide range of cognitive functions, including autobiographical memory, spatial navigation, the imagination of scenes, and thinking about the future. There is ongoing debate about the precise role played by the hippocampus, for example, whether the tasks assessing these functions are linked by a memory process or the endogenous construction of scene imagery. To address this question, we collected a unique dataset (n = 217) using tests that assessed participants’ memory for traditional laboratory-based stimuli, performance on more complex ‘real world’ tasks such as spatial navigation, subjective assessments, examination of cognitive strategies, and detailed demographic and lifestyle information. This was combined with a suite of neuroimaging measures. In this talk, I will present results from our initial analyses of these data, in particular examining the relationships between cognitive tasks, the association between objective and subjective measures, the strategies used to perform the tasks, and the relationships between performance, grey matter volume and tissue microstructure. I will conclude by highlighting the future directions we propose to take with this dataset in terms of their potential for clarifying the role of the hippocampus in cognition, and also for data-sharing.

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