How we remember and how we forget

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• Aidan J Horner, Department of Psychology, University of York, York Biomedical Research Institute, University of York
• Friday 25 October 2019, 16:30-18:00
• Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Louise White.

Our ability to remember complex real-world events is thought to be supported by ‘event engrams’ – coherent representations of the constituent elements of any event that allow for later recollection. The hippocampus is thought to support these representations, receiving input from multiple neocortical regions to bind together the multiple elements of any event. At retrieval, a partial cue is thought to lead to the retrieval of a complete event engram (pattern completion) and subsequent reinstatement in the neocortex. I will present behavioural, computational and fMRI evidence to support the proposal that recollection is supported by the existence of complex event engrams in the hippocampus that are retrieved and reinstated by a pattern completion process. I will then ask how such event engrams are forgotten – do they fragment such that we forget some aspects of an event whilst retaining others, or are they forgotten in a relatively all-or-none fashion? Across a body of research, I will provide evidence that complex events are both remembered and forgotten in a relatively all-or-none manner – event engrams are encoded in a highly coherent manner and retain this coherence over time.

Aidan completed his BSc in psychology and MSc in cognitive neuroscience at the University of York, and his PhD in cognitive Neuroscience at the Unversity of Cambridge. He held postdoctoral positions at the Otto-von-Guericke University and University College London. He is currently a lecturer in psychology at the University of York.

This talk is part of the Zangwill Club series.

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