Dr. Alison Preston, UT-Austin, Center for Learning and Memory, Departments of Psychology & Neurobiology
"The Constructive Nature of Memory"
Abstract: Memory is essential to everyday life. We often reflect on our past to understand current experience or predict future events. For example, in choosing a birthday gift for a friend, we may look to past birthdays for help in deciding what gift would elicit the greatest joy for the friend this year. In this way, memory is not merely retrospective, but also intrinsically prospective. To be maximally adaptive for such future use, memories do not simply reflect individual records of directly experienced events, but also include representations built by combining knowledge across many experiences. This constructive nature of memory allows us to extract new knowledge beyond our direct experience. Such derived knowledge increases the predictive power of our memories, but may depend on our ability to fully attend to our environment. Join Dr. Alison Preston as she discusses her work combining brain imaging techniques with advanced computational methods to visualize how the brain builds predictive memories.
