CAREER: The Neural Basis of Memory for Visual Environments

As we navigate through our world, the visual scene in front of us is seamlessly integrated with our knowledge of the broader spatial environment, helping to form mental maps of our environment. The seamless nature of perception is quite remarkable, especially considering that each view of our environment is discrete and fleeting, separated by expansive eye movements that produce discontinuous views of our spatial surroundings.

Understanding how this is accomplished in the brain is a major scientific puzzle. The goal of this project is to determine how memory and perception interface in the human brain during real-world scene perception. Using a combination of tools, including immersive virtual reality and brain imaging, this project promises fundamental knowledge about how the human brain constructs memories of a naturalistic environments and how these memories influence everyday visual experience.

This project also advances inclusive STEM education by removing barriers for neurodiverse learners, broadening participation of URM and female college students in neuroscience, and contributing to scientific outreach in rural communities.

This project aims to understand the nature of memory for immersive, real-world environments in the human brain, and to shed light on how mnemonic and perceptual signals interact during real-world perception. To tackle these questions, this project leverages two distinctive innovations: (1) a new technical approach to study human memory and perception in naturalistic settings using head-mounted virtual reality, and (2) fine-grained individual subject brain imaging (fMRI -functional magnetic resonance imaging) analyses to characterize the nature of visuo-mnemonic representations in the brain.

This multimodal approach allows for controlled tests of which neural systems support perception and memory for real world environments, and direct manipulations of the content of learned environments to understand the neural representation of familiar scenes. Finally, this project forwards a novel theory of mnemonic-visual interactions in the brain and specifically tests whether place memory is associated with a different brain area (shifted anterior) relative to scene perception.

This research will also determine how this change in the location of the brain representation for place memory is related to the amount of contextual information, participants’ memory performance, and scene-specific processes. Finally, this project will also explore whether such an “anterior shift” represents a general principle of how mnemonic and high-level visual areas interact in the brain.

Together, these studies promise to generate fundamental knowledge about the nature of memory for immersive, real-world environments in the human brain, and, more broadly, the mechanisms by which stored knowledge about the world interfaces with perception during naturalistic visual experience.

This project is jointly funded by the Cognitive Neuroscience Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.