UNIVERSITY OF DENVER
Grant: $75,750 - National Institutes of Health - Sep. 10, 2009
No votes have been cast for this award yet
Join the conversation: Post a comment about this award
Award Description: The purpose of this project is to investigate the relative contribution of familiarity and recollection to the development of visual recognition memory in infants. Recollection involves the retrieval of information about the context in which an item was previously encountered, and is thought to depend critically on the hippocampus. Familiarity, on the other hand, involves the assessment of global similarities between study and test items that appears to be mediated by perirhinal cortex and high-level visual association areas. The extent to which recollection and familiarity contribute to visueal recognition memory in infants is unknown, and is critical to our understanding ob both memory development and brain development in infants. Our hypotheses is that familiarity contributes to infant recognition earlier in development than recollection. Moreover, given that relatively protracted course of development of the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus in particular, we hypothesize that recollection does not emerge until sometime during the second year of life. To test these hypotheses, we will examine the effects of manipulations known to disslocate recollection and familiarity in adults and experimental animals on infants' performance in the visual-paired comparison (VPC). The specific aims of this award are to: (1) Examine the contribution of recollection to infant visual memory and (2) Examine the contribution of familiarity to infant visual recognition memory. This project is the first step in a long-term plan to systematically examine the neural mechanisms of recollection and familiarity in infants.
Project Description: Project did not start until October 2009.
Infrastructure Description: NA
Jobs Summary: Project just started in October 2009. A position of Professional Research Assistant/Lab Manager will be created (25 hours per week) . This position is responsible for subject recruitment and scheduling activites, serving as the lead experimenter during test sessions, routine data management, and overseeing video-coding activities. Two undergraduate research assistants (10 hours per week each) will also be added and are responsible for subject recruitment and scheduling. (Total jobs reported: 0)
Project Status: Not Started
This award's data was last updated on Sep. 10, 2009. Help expand these official descriptions using the wiki below.
No comments have been added for this project.