Dear All,
here is a short abstract for Attila Keresztes's Cognitive Seminar talk on 5th February entitled
Hippocampal contributions to memory specificity across the
lifespan
abstract:
Adaptive learning systems need to meet two complementary and
partially conflicting goals: detecting regularities in the world
versus remembering specific events. The hippocampus (HC) keeps a
fine balance between computations that extract commonalities of
incoming information (i.e. generalization through pattern
completion) and computations that enable encoding of highly similar
events into unique representations (i.e. memory specificity through
pattern separation). During early ontogeny, the rapid and cumulative
acquisition of world knowledge through generalization contrasts
slower improvements in the ability to lay down highly specific,
long-lasting episodic memories. At the other end of the lifespan, an
early decrease in memory specificity is paralleled with relatively
intact generalization. In this talk, I will highlight recent
behavioral and neuroimaging evidence suggesting that maturational
differences among subfields within the hippocampus contribute to the
lead-lag relation between generalization and specificity during
childhood and adolescence, and present preliminary results of a
study investigating how scenescent changes within the hippocampus
affect specificity and generalization. In sum, I propose that
developmental changes within the hippocampus affect the fine balance
between specificity and generalization across the human lifespan.
Hope to see you there!
