Project Abstract/Summary
There is a significant need to advance understanding of the basic neurocognitive mechanisms that enable the human mind and brain to accomplish the tasks of encoding, retaining, and retrieving information in working memory in the service of goal-directed actions. These mechanisms are fundamental for cognition, and dysfunction with some of these processes likely underlie age-related memory deficits over both the short term and the long term. This project will help clarify how information retained in working memory is reactivated in younger and older adults, and how the consolidation of these memories, which are volatile over the short term, may be enhanced with noninvasive brain stimulation over the long term. This project will also build educational and outreach activities, to students and older adults, through community-based learning programs about memory, aging, and the brain. The project will also provide student trainees with a unique set of research skills that will help catapult them towards advanced work in a variety of STEM-related fields.
The specific objective of the research project is to identify the mechanisms that enable the reactivation of information that is passively retained in working memory – that is, information that is not in an individual’s current focus of attention, or what is called “latent working memory.” The hypothesis is that applying noninvasive brain stimulation (specifically, transcranial magnetic stimulation) to sensory (visual) regions of the brain while participants are passively retaining latent information in visual working memory will reactivate stimulus-specific features of the information whereas stimulating regions of frontal-parietal cortex will reactivate the task goals/rules (i.e., which memory the participant is to be attending to at that particular time), and strengthen the consolidation of these memories. The hypotheses will be tested in experiments using new technologies and innovative methods to safely manipulate brain activity and decode memory representations from simultaneously recorded neuroimaging signals using artificial intelligence, machine-learning algorithms. At the conclusion of this project the PI will have shown causal evidence for the roles of frontal, parietal and sensory regions in storing and reactivating latent working memories in both older and young adult humans. This basic research will facilitate the development of techniques that have the potential for widespread translational applications for enhancing learning and memory functioning in young and older adulthood.
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.
Principal Investigator
Nathan Rose – University of Notre Dame located in NOTRE DAME, IN
Co-Principal Investigators
Funders
Funding Amount
$750,883.00
Project Start Date
09/01/2019
Project End Date
08/31/2025
Will the project remain active for the next two years?
The project has more than two years remaining
Source: National Science Foundation
Please be advised that recent changes in federal funding schemes may have impacted the project’s scope and status.
Updated: April, 2025