Killam Seminar Series: Short-term and Working Memory in Health and Disease
The Killam Seminar Series at The Neuro
Supported by the generosity of the Killam Trusts, The Neuro’s Killam Seminar series hosts outstanding guest speakers whose research is of interest to the scientific community at The Neuro and McGill University.
Registration is available now on Eventbrite. ZOOM link sent to registrants.
Speaker: Dr. Masud Husain
Mechanisms underlying short-term memory (STM) have become extremely controversial. New methods to measure the precision of recall have provided sensitive means to probe STM. However, the results challenge established dogma on visual STM being limited to a store of a fixed number of items. Instead, the findings suggest that it might be best captured by a limited resource model, where the amount of resource allocated to items can be flexibly and dynamically altered.
New experimental techniques have also made it possible to track how memory quality declines over just seconds, with the pattern of errors revealing underlying mechanisms that lead to corruption of memory over time. Moreover, protecting the contents of STM by ignoring distractors or updating its contents has different costs on precision of recall of working memory.
Application of these techniques to disorders associated with hippocampal damage, either by focal lesions or degeneration as in Alzheimer’s disease, has revealed a specific signature of STM and working memory dysfunction, dissociable from that observed in Parkinson’s disease. Measuring the precision of recall provides a powerful new way to measure STM and working memory in health and disease states.
The event will be livestreamed via VIMEO: https://vimeo.com/event/266553
