Human Neuroscience Talk

Memories are not veridical records of prior experiences, but rather are influenced by affective states such as threat. For example, your memory for a walk home spent ruminating on recent upswings in violent crime may be more disorganized than a walk home spent enjoying the local architecture. While prior research has characterized threat’s influence on memory, this work often uses simple assessments (i.e., accuracy) of simple memoranda (i.e., static pictures). However, memory is a dynamic process that unfolds over time allowing for flexibility in both what we remember and how information is organized. In this talk, I will present recent work characterizing the threat's influence on the fragmentation of event memory. I will unpack these processes both through the lens of medial temporal lobe neurophysiology as well as cognitive/computational models of how items are bound to temporal contexts. Finally, I will unpack how threat-related memory fragmentation biases adaptive behavior in both normative and clinical populations.