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Location:
Lila Davachi, Professor of Psychology, Columbia University, New York
TOPIC: "The wisdom of the unconscious mind: Offline reactivation consolidates, integrates and updates knowledge"
Encoding
How are memories formed? We have focused on understanding how the brain and, in particular, the medial temporal lobe (MTL) encodes our experiences. Our main approach has been to examine brain activation in MTL substructures during an experience and to identify patterns of activation that are associated with successful memory formation. We are particularly interested in how we build memories that allow us to later reconstruct the episodic details (the what, when and where) of the past.
Recently, we have also focused on understanding how our perception of event structure (i.e. segmentation) modulates both how those events become organized in memory and the neural processes used to bind information within and across events. Perception, attention, working memory and prediction all interact with encoding processes to determine what will be remembered and how it will be linked with other aspects of our ongoing experience.