Ausbildung kortikaler Repräsentationen, die der langfristigen perzeptuellen Bahnung (Priming) zugrunde liegen: Die Rolle von Verarbeitungseffizienz, Aufmerksamkeit, neuronaler Selektivität und Markmalsverlust
Final Report Abstract
Perceptual priming is a capability by which memory left in the brain by a prior event influences current perception. For example, words and objects encountered in the recent past are perceived more accurately and faster than words and objects not recently encountered, and ambiguous stimuli are more likely to receive a perceptual interpretation that conforms to a perceptual interpretation adopted in the recent past. Thus, memory "greases the wheels" of perception. Perceptual priming is a critical memory capability because it plays a strong role in creating intelligent, adaptive, behaviour—but it has particularly attracted interest because it sometimes appears to occur in the absence of conscious recollection of the prior event whose influence is revealed in current behaviour. For example, patients with amnesia caused by brain damage sometimes show intact perceptual priming, while being unable to remember anything about the past event that caused the priming. A key goal in cognitive neuroscience has, therefore, been to investigate the brain mechanisms underlying perceptual priming, and the extent to which these differ from the brain mechanisms underlying conscious recollection. This DFG project was designed to provide further critical information on this issue. Prior to the project, much research in cognitive neuroscience had focussed on the neural processes that happen at the time when perceptual priming occurs, that is, at the very time when perception is facilitated by a past event—in cognitive neuroscience terms, neural processes at retrieval. A typical finding is that the facilitating influence on perceptual performance, as revealed in behavioural measures, is accompanied by a decreased neural response, a phenomenon sometimes called neural repetition suppression. In past work, the principal investigator and his colleagues at the University of Magdeburg had shown that these repetition-related neural response decreases truly relate to perceptual priming in the absence of conscious recollection—even in normal healthy human participants. Much less investigated prior to the project were the neural processes that occur at the time when memory traces are laid down in the brain that lead to later perceptual priming—in cognitive neuroscience terms, neural processes at encoding. The principal investigator and colleagues had conducted some pioneering work on this issue and had uncovered preliminary evidence that encoding events relating to later perceptual priming occur in the brain before encoding events relating to later conscious recollection, and that these priming-related events occur in neural pathways that are involved in the identification of external stimuli, and not in neural pathways that are typically associated with laying down memory traces that support later conscious recollection. They also uncovered fascinating initial evidence that different kinds of attention to stimuli during encoding might be involved in laying down neural memory traces for later priming as compared with neural memory traces for later conscious recollection. The current project was designed to provide more conclusive evidence, using evolutions of the behavioural techniques that had been developed to study memory encoding and retrieval in the prior research. At retrieval (i.e., the memory test), research participants were asked to identify (name) rapidly flashed words, which made identification difficult. Some of these words had been encountered before in the experiment during another task (i.e., the encoding task), and others had not, allowing assessment of priming at test—an identification-advantage for old over new words. For each identified word, participants had to indicate whether they remembered having encountered the word earlier in the experiment, allowing assessment of conscious recollection. Words were classified as identified and remembered (R), identified but not remembered (primed, P), or not identified at all (nonID). Brain responses during the encoding task measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were then seperated according to the later fate of the word at test. The researchers discovered striking evidence for two neural networks in the brain supporting later priming and later conscious recollection, respectively, the former consisting of dorsal prefrontal and ventral posterior parietal areas, and the latter consisting of of ventral prefrontal and dorsal posterior parietal areas. These networks pointed to two different kinds of attention that might be involved at encoding: Attention to the perceptual characteristics of the word (i.e., appearance), versus attention to the conceptual characteristics of the word (i.e., meaning). In follow-up work, the researchers confirmed this hypothesis by manipulating attention at encoding, to involve either attention to perceptual characterics or attention to conceptual characteristics. The same two memory networks were revealed, relating to later perceptual priming and to later conscious recollection, respectively. In addition to elucidating the basic mechanisms of memory formation, these results could have considerable relevance to understanding neurological conditions involving impaired priming.
Publications
- (2009). On the intimate relationship between neurobiology and function in the theoretical analysis of human learning and memory. In F. Rösler, C. Ranganath, B. Röder, & R. H. Kluwe (Eds.), Neuroimaging of human memory: Linking cognitive processes to neural systems (pp. 127-165). New York: Oxford University Press
Richardson-Klavehn, A., Bergström, Z. M., Magno, E., Markopoulos, G., Sweeney-Reed, C. M., & Wimber, M.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217298.001.0001) - (2010). Distinct fronto-parietal networks set the stage for later perceptual identification priming and episodic recognition memory. Journal of Neuroscience, 30, 13272-13280
Wimber, M., Heinze, H.-J., & Richardson-Klavehn, A.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0588-10.2010) - (2010). On the fruitful relationship between functional neuroimaging and cognitive theories of human learning and memory. In A. S. Benjamin (Ed.), Successful remembering and successful forgetting: A Festschrift in honor of Robert A. Bjork (pp. 477- 503). New York: Psychology Press
Richardson-Klavehn, A.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203842539) - (2010). Prestimulus neural oscillations and their haemodynamic correlates elucidate the cognitive and neural processes of memory formation. Clinical Neurophysiology, 41, 137-146
Richardson-Klavehn, A.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1055/s-0030-1252031) - (2010). Priming, automatic recollection, and control of retrieval: Toward an integrative retrieval architecture. In J. H. Mace (Ed.), The act of remembering: Toward an understanding of how we recall the past (pp. 111-179). Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell
Richardson-Klavehn, A.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444328202) - (2011). A neural dissocation between conceptual and perceptual processing components during long-term memory formation. 5th International Conference on Memory, York, UK
Wimber, M., & Richardson-Klavehn, A.
- (2011). Motivational salience modulates hippocampal repetition suppression and functional connectivity in humans. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, e144
Zweynert, S., Pade, J. P., Wüstenberg, T., Sterzer, P., Walter, H., Seidenbecher, C. I., Richardson-Klavehn, A., Düzel, E., & Schott, B. H.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00144) - (2011). Prefrontal dopamine and the dynamic control of human long-term memory. Translational Psychiatry, 1, e15
Wimber, M., Schott, B. H., Wendler, F., Seidenbecher, C. I., Behnisch, G., Macharadze, T., Bäuml, K.-H., & Richardson-Klavehn, A.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/tp.2011.15) - (2012). Rapid memory reactivation revealed by oscillatory entrainment. Current Biology, 22, 1482-1486
Wimber, M., Maaß, A., Staudigl, T., Richardson-Klavehn, A., & Hanslmayr, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.054) - (2015). Non-holistic coding of objects in lateral occipital complex with and without attention. NeuroImage, 107, 356-363
Guggenmos, M., Thoma, V., Cichy, R. M., Haynes, J.-D., Sterzer, P., & Richardson-Klavehn, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.12.013) - (2015). Spatial attention enhances object coding in local and distributed representations of the lateral occipital complex. NeuroImage, 116, 149-157
Guggenmos, M., Thoma, V., Haynes, J.-D., Richardson-Klavehn, A., Cichy, R. M., & Sterzer, P.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.04.004) - (2016). Event-related potential effects of object repetition depend on attention and part-whole configuration. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 478
Gosling, A., Thoma, V., de Fockert, J. W., & Richardson-Klavehn, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00478)
