LOVE 2013 Programme with Abstracts (PDF) - Judith M Shedden ...

SPEAKERSMORGAN BARENSEThe interface of memory andperception: Where parts becomewholeAbstract: Memory and perception have long been considered separatecognitive processes, and amnesia resulting from medial temporal lobe(MTL) damage is thought to reflect damage to a dedicated memorysystem. Recent work has questioned these views, suggesting that amnesiacan result from impoverished perceptual representations in theMTL, causing an increased susceptibility to interference. These findingshave suggested that one MTL structure in particular, the perirhinalcortex (PRC), may be considered an extension of the representationalhierarchy in the ventral visual stream: an object’s low-level features arerepresented in early posterior regions, whereas conjunctions of featuresare represented in more anterior regions, with the most complex featureconjunctions – perhaps at the level of the whole object – being representedin PRC. Using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of fMRI data,I will present evidence to support this view. I will then present findingsfrom two tasks (a perceptual matching task for which fMRI implicated thePRC and a recognition memory task dependent on the PRC in rats) toshow that memory-impaired individuals were vulnerable to object-basedperceptual interference. Importantly, when we controlled such interference,their performance recovered to normal levels. These findingschallenge prevailing conceptions of amnesia, suggesting that effectsof damage to specific MTL regions are better understood not in termsof damage to a dedicated declarative memory system, but in terms ofimpoverished representations of the stimuli those regions maintain.2