Research

There is substantial variability in the clinical expression of neuropathology following traumatic brain injury (TBI). These inconsistencies may be explained, in part, by cognitive reserve. The cognitive reserve theory posits that intelligence and intellectual enrichment can protect against neuropathology.

The hippocampus contributes to both remembering specific events and generalization across events. Recent work suggests that information may be represented along the longitudinal axis of the hippocampus at varied levels of specificity: detailed representations in the posterior hippocampus and generalized representations in the anterior hippocampus.

Functional connectivity is used in MRI to understand the functional relevance of coherent brain activity between brain regions. Importantly, functional connections contains idiosyncratic features that can be leveraged to identify individuals and predict individual behavior.

External motivation, such as a promise of future monetary reward for remembering an event, can affect which events are remembered. Reward-based memory modulation is thought to result from encoding and post-encoding interactions between dopaminergic midbrain, signaling reward, and hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex, supporting episodic memory.

Memory allows us to remember individual experiences (memory specificity) as well as link across experiences to form generalized knowledge (generalization). Still debated, however, is the degree to which generalization relies on unique processes beyond memory for individual experiences, such as the integration of related memories into a combined representation.

Memory integration refers to the process by which new experiences are linked to and stored with related memories. How memory integration affects the individual memories is unclear. Some have argued that memory integration protects against interference between related memories, while others have shown that memory integration leads to interference.