Psychologist to explore how brain remembers precise information

Credit: University of California, Riverside. RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A person’s general intelligence and ability to understand language are reliant on the brain’s ability to maintain precise information acquired over a short period of time. To understand how these types of natural vision and cognitive functions are achieved in both healthy populations and individuals at high risk for psychosis, Weiwei Zhang, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Riverside, will assess how the brain’s hippocampus, a deep structure believed to be an exclusive hub for long-term memory, supports encoding, maintaining, and accessing precise short-term and long-term memories. An expert on visual attention, working memory, and cognitive modeling, Zhang has received a five-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, a division of the National Institutes of Health, to conduct the research. "We will use functional neuroimaging to investigate whether the hippocampus in human participants shows an increase in neural activities when we try to remember ongoing events as accurately and precisely as possible," said Zhang, the grant’s principal investigator. "This project will provide a clearer understanding of the functional limitations in working memory and establish the basic science backbone for future practice designed to understand and treat cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia spectrum disorders and foggy memory in aging and other clinical populations." Zhang said the brain’s maintenance of information over a short period of time in working memory is pivotal for observers’ efficient interaction with exceedingly rich environmental content for both lower-level perception, such as maintaining relevant information across eye movements, and higher-level cognitive functions, including general intelligence and decision making. Research in the past several decades on working memory and its deficits in various clinical populations has emphasized the quantitative aspect of working memory — how much information can be retained — and the corresponding neural […]

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