MPUTC Joint PhD Program

Thesis Topic : Specific Hippocampal pathways mediate episodic memory and statistical learning.

Description: The process by which new memories are layered upon prior experience and knowledge remains poorly understood. Growing evidence suggests that the hippocampus is critical for rapidly extracting regularities from the environment, a process known as statistical learning. These results, which imply generalization across episodes, are however at odd with the known role of the hippocampus in encoding individual memories. An extension of the complementary learning system accommodates this conundrum by postulating that episodic memory and statistical learning operate via different hippocampal pathways. Although this model provides a theoretical solution to a long-standing puzzle in the field, testing it in human subjects is technically challenging as it requires imaging the hippocampus with high spatial resolution to enable subfield classification and high temporal resolution to characterize the sequence of activity in the two pathways. We want to acquire unique datasets for this purpose by integrating 7T high-field fMRI with invasive electrophysiology, and electrical stimulation of specific hippocampal subfield in epilepsy patients while subjects perform associative learning and statistical learning tasks. This project seeks to establish a new multi-institution, high-throughput collaboration for large-scale, non-invasive imaging, invasive neural recording and stimulation to study memory processes in healthy subjects and patients.