El próximo martes 18 de febrero, a las 16:30, el prof. Charan Ranganath (http://neuroscience.ucdavis.edu/user/51) dará una charla en la Sala de Conferencias 2 del CIMCYC
Title: Memory is more than words: Context Counts!
Abstract: Since the pioneering research of Ebbinghaus, the traditional approach to studying memory has been to test recognition or recall of lists of words or other “items”. However, in the 1960s-1970s, researchers like Tulving argued that, even when asked to learn a list of items, people spontaneously associate them with information about the context (i.e., place, time, situation) in which the learning took place. Although much of that research has been overlooked in cognitive neuroscience, I will argue that the distinction between item and context information is crucial to understanding the neural substrates of human memory. In the first half of my talk, I will review evidence from our lab demonstrating that different brain areas represent item and context information in memory, and in the second half, I will present new evidence linking electrical oscillations in the brain to the successful retrieval of contextual information about studied items. The findings from these studies open up new questions about how contextual information is learned and retrieved and also point to potential methods for improving function in patients with memory disorders.