The goal of this project is the development of episodic memory tasks. Episodic memory allows us to recall a specific event from the past.
To study the mechanisms of episodic memory, a simplified model is often used – the so-called memory of episodic type. According to this model, each memory is stored in a certain contextual framework, characterized by three basic conditions: event identity ('What happened?'), time ('When did it happen?') and spatial component ('Where did it happen?').
The task uses a simple principle of collecting objects (see image below). The person's task is to first collect several objects in the given environment. A person is navigated to the individual objects by the arrow. Subsequently, the task of the person is to recall, after a short delay, where and when the object was picked up and to return them to their original positions in the original order.
The study deals with the neurobiological substrate of individual components of the memory of episodic type using functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) in healthy volunteers, using ecologically valid tasks in virtual reality.
The results of data obtained through the fMRI task show that, in addition to the common neuronal substrate of episodic memory, there are (to some extent) different brain structures responsible for recalling individual components of the model of the memory of episodic type.
Behavioral data indicate that the complexity of recalling the individual components is not equivalent. Additional analysis using a new method of parceling the brain into individual structures (see figure below), with subsequent determination of the volume of the hippocampus and its subregions (see figure 1), showed that the volume of the hippocampus is significantly correlated only with the success in recalling the condition 'What?' (i.e., event identity).
The project was launched with the financial support of the Czech Science Foundation (GACR), project No. 22-10493S. The principal investigator is PhDr. RNDr. Tereza Nekovářová, Ph.D. and the project title is "Different Concepts of Episodic Memory: Context vs. Self".
