Dual processes in memory: Evidence from memory of time-of-occurrence of events.

Bastin et al. present a framework that draws heavily on existing ideas of dual processes in memory in order to make predictions about memory deficits in clinical populations. It has been difficult to find behavioral evidence for multiple memory processes but we offer some evidence for dual processes in a related domain: memory for the time-of-occurrence of events.

Signal Complexity of Human Intracranial EEG Tracks Successful Associative-Memory Formation across Individuals.

Memory performance is highly variable among individuals. Most studies examining human memory, however, have largely focused on the neural correlates of successful memory formation within individuals, rather than the differences among them. As such, what gives rise to this variability is poorly understood. Here, we examined intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings captured from 43 participants (23 male) implanted with subdural electrodes for seizure monitoring as they performed a paired-associates verbal memory task. We identified three separate but related signatures of neural activity that tracked differences in successful memory formation across individuals. High-performing individuals consistently exhibited less broadband power, flatter power spectral density slopes, and greater complexity in their iEEG signals. Furthermore, within individuals across three separate time scales ranging from seconds to days, successful recall was positively associated with these same metrics. Our data therefore suggest that memory ability across individuals can be indexed by increased neural signal complexity.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We show that participants whose intracranial EEG exhibits less low-frequency power, flatter power spectrums, and greater sample entropy overall are better able to memorize associations, and that the same metrics track fluctuations in memory performance across time within individuals. These metrics together signify greater neural signal complexity, which may index the brain's ability to flexibly engage with information and generate separable memory representations. Critically, the current set of results provides a unique window into the neural markers of individual differences in memory performance, which have hitherto been underexplored.

A system for collecting and analyzing experience-sampling data.

Online and sensor technologies promise to transform many areas of psychological enquiry. However, collecting and analyzing such data are challenging. In this article, we introduce the unforgettable.me experience-sampling platform. Unforgettable.me includes an app that can collect image, Global Positioning System, accelerometry, and audio data in a continuous fashion and upload the data to a server. The data are then automatically augmented by using online databases to identify the address, type of location, and weather conditions, as well as provide street view imagery. In addition, machine-learning classifiers are run to identify aspects of the audio data such as voice and traffic. The augmented data are available to participants in the form of a keyword search interface, as well as via several visualization mechanisms. In addition, Unforgettable Research Services partners with If This Then That (IFTTT), and so can accumulate data from any of over 600 sources, including social media, wearables, and other devices. Through IFTTT, buttons can be added as icons to smartphones to allow participants to register mood conveniently, as well as behaviors and physiological states such as happiness, microaggressions, or illness. Furthermore, unforgettable.me incorporates a mechanism that allows researchers to run experiments and analyze data within an authenticated environment without viewing users' private data.

Privacy versus open science.

Pervasive internet and sensor technologies promise to revolutionize psychological science. However, the data collected using these technologies are often very personal-indeed, the value of the data is often directly related to how personal they are. At the same time, driven by the replication crisis, there is a sustained push to publish data to open repositories. These movements are in fundamental conflict. In this article, we propose a way to navigate this issue. We argue that there are significant advantages to be gained by ceding the ownership of data to the participants who generate the data. We then provide desiderata for a privacy-preserving platform. In particular, we suggest that researchers should use an interface to perform experiments and run analyses, rather than observing the stimuli themselves. We argue that this method not only improves privacy but will also encourage greater compliance with good research practices than is possible through open repositories.

Human hippocampus represents space and time during retrieval of real-world memories.

Memory stretches over a lifetime. In controlled laboratory settings, the hippocampus and other medial temporal lobe brain structures have been shown to represent space and time on the scale of meters and seconds. It remains unclear whether the hippocampus also represents space and time over the longer scales necessary for human episodic memory. We recorded neural activity while participants relived their own experiences, cued by photographs taken with a custom lifelogging device. We found that the left anterior hippocampus represents space and time for a month of remembered events occurring over distances of up to 30 km. Although previous studies have identified similar drifts in representational similarity across space or time over the relatively brief time scales (seconds to minutes) that characterize individual episodic memories, our results provide compelling evidence that a similar pattern of spatiotemporal organization also exists for organizing distinct memories that are distant in space and time. These results further support the emerging view that the anterior, as opposed to posterior, hippocampus integrates distinct experiences, thereby providing a scaffold for encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories on the scale of our lives.

Examining dependencies among different time scales in episodic memory - an experience sampling study.

We re-examined whether different time scales such as week, day of week, and hour of day are independently used during memory retrieval as has been previously argued (i.e., independence of scales). To overcome the limitations of previous studies, we used experience sampling technology to obtain test stimuli that have higher ecological validity. We also used pointwise mutual information to directly calculate the degree of dependency between time scales in a formal way. Participants were provided with a smartphone and were asked to wear it around their neck for two weeks, which was equipped with an app that automatically collected time, images, GPS, audio and accelerometry. After a one-week retention interval, participants were presented with an image that was captured during their data collection phase, and were tested on their memory of when the event happened (i.e., week, day of week, and hour). We find that, in contrast to previous arguments, memories of different time scales were not retrieved independently. Moreover, through rendering recurrence plots of the images that the participants collected, we provide evidence the dependency may have originated from the repetitive events that the participants encountered in their daily life.

Changing temporal context in human temporal lobe promotes memory of distinct episodes.

Memories of experiences that occur around the same time are linked together by a shared temporal context, represented by shared patterns of neural activity. However, shared temporal context may be problematic for selective retrieval of specific memories. Here, we examine intracranial EEG (iEEG) in the human temporal lobe as participants perform a verbal paired associates memory task that requires the encoding of distinct word pairs in memory. We find that the rate of change in patterns of low frequency (3-12 Hz) power distributed across the temporal lobe is significantly related to memory performance. We also find that exogenous electrical stimulation affects how quickly these neural representations of temporal context change with time, which directly affects the ability to successfully form memories for distinct items. Our results indicate that the ability to retrieve distinct episodic memories is related to how quickly neural representations of temporal context change over time during encoding.

The experience of vivid autobiographical reminiscence is supported by subjective content representations in the precuneus.

The human posteromedial cortex, which includes core regions of the default mode network (DMN), is thought to play an important role in episodic memory. However, the nature and functional role of representations in these brain regions remain unspecified. Nine participants (all female) wore smartphone devices to record episodes from their daily lives for multiple weeks, each night indicating the personally-salient attributes of each episode. Participants then relived their experiences in an fMRI scanner cued by images from their own lives. Representational Similarity Analysis revealed a broad network, including parts of the DMN, that represented personal semantics during autobiographical reminiscence. Within this network, activity in the right precuneus reflected more detailed representations of subjective contents during vivid relative to non-vivid, recollection. Our results suggest a more specific mechanism underlying the phenomenology of vivid autobiographical reminiscence, supported by rich subjective content representations in the precuneus, a hub of the DMN previously implicated in metacognitive evaluations during memory retrieval.

The Episodic Nature of Experience: A Dynamical Systems Analysis.

Context is an important construct in many domains of cognition, including learning, memory, and emotion. We used dynamical systems methods to demonstrate the episodic nature of experience by showing a natural separation between the scales over which within-context and between-context relationships operate. To do this, we represented an individual's emails extending over about 5 years in a high-dimensional semantic space and computed the dimensionalities of the subspaces occupied by these emails. Personal discourse has a two-scaled geometry with smaller within-context dimensionalities than between-context dimensionalities. Prior studies have shown that reading experience (Doxas, Dennis, & Oliver, 2010) and visual experience (Sreekumar, Dennis, Doxas, Zhuang, & Belkin, 2014) have a similar two-scaled structure. Furthermore, the recurrence plot of the emails revealed that experience is predictable and hierarchical, supporting the constructs of some influential theories of memory. The results demonstrate that experience is not scale-free and provide an important target for accounts of how experience shapes cognition.

Principled Approaches to Direct Brain Stimulation for Cognitive Enhancement.

In this brief review, we identify key areas of research that inform a systematic and targeted approach for invasive brain stimulation with the goal of modulating higher cognitive functions such as memory. We outline several specific challenges that must be successfully navigated in order to achieve this goal. Specifically, using direct brain stimulation to support memory requires demonstrating that (1) there are reliable neural patterns corresponding to different events and memory states, (2) stimulation can be used to induce these target activity patterns, and (3) inducing such patterns modulates memory in the expected directions. Invasive stimulation studies typically have not taken into account intrinsic brain states and dynamics, nor have they a priori targeted specific neural patterns that have previously been identified as playing an important role in memory. Moreover, the effects of stimulation on neural activity are poorly understood and are sensitive to multiple factors including the specific stimulation parameters, the processing state of the brain at the time of stimulation, and neuroanatomy of the stimulated region. As a result, several studies have reported conflicting results regarding the use of direct stimulation for memory modulation. Here, we review the latest findings relevant to these issues and discuss how we can gain better control over the effects of direct brain stimulation for modulating human memory and cognition.

The geometry and dynamics of lifelogs: discovering the organizational principles of human experience.

A correlation dimension analysis of people's visual experiential streams captured by a smartphone shows that visual experience is two-scaled with a smaller dimension at shorter length scales than at longer length scales. The bend between the two scales is a phase transition point where the lower scale primarily captures relationships within the same context and the higher dimensional scale captures relationships between different contexts. The dimensionality estimates are confirmed using Takens' delay embedding procedure on the image stream, while the randomly permuted stream is shown to be space-filling thereby establishing that the two-scaled structure is a consequence of the dynamics. We note that the structure of visual experience closely resembles the structure of another domain of experience: natural language discourse. The emergence of an identical structure across different domains of human experience suggests that the two-scaled geometry reflects a general organizational principle.