Past events: Charan Ranganath. Time to Get Real About Episodic Memory

What: Time to Get Real About Episodic Memory

Where: BCBL auditorium

Who: Charan Ranganath, PhD; Director, Memory and Plasticity Program; Professor, Center for Neuroscience and Dept. of Psychology, University of California at Davis, California, EEUU

When: 12:00 PM

Episodic memory, the ability to recollect past events, has been the focus of extensive study in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Almost all of this research has operationalized episodic memory as the ability to recall or recognize specific items from a list. Real life episodes, however, unfold over a long timescale, and they have a complex structure that is built on knowledge about past events. In this talk, I will describe new research aimed at understanding the roles of particular brain networks in representing information about people, places, and situations during the experience of complex events and later, when this information is recalled. I will also describe evidence suggesting how memory consolidation may enable the ability to integrate information acquired in different episodes. Collectively, this work highlights the overlap between the neural circuitry that supports episodic memory and the ability to form situation models that enable comprehension of film, prose, and spoken conversation.