Please join us for this seminar from visiting postdoc candidate from University of Toronto, Nick Diamond. The Kahana Lab will be hosting this event, and lunch will be provided.

Location: 357 Levin Building

Detail and organization in memory for real-world experiences

Episodic memory is defined by (1) re-experiencing specific details from past events and (2) recovering the spatiotemporal context in which events were embedded. Accordingly, in normal and pathological aging and amnesia, memories tend to become both detail-impoverished and temporally disorganized. However, it remains unclear whether and how these two components are related in memories for complex, extended events. I will present data from a series of behavioural, aging and fMRI experiments in which I investigated detail and temporal structure in memory for real-world experiences. Temporal context shaped free recall and recognition at delays ranging from days to years, with measures of temporal recall organization predicting episodic detail richness. However, temporal structure was preserved over time at the expense of specific details, and may be especially vulnerable to age-related decline. Together, these findings show both connections and differences between our ability to relive specific moments in time and retrace trajectories between them.