EAGER: Investigating the role of spontaneous thought in memory consolidation with real-time neuroimaging

About This Grant

People spend roughly 30-50% of their time thinking about things other than what they are currently doing. Although such “mind-wandering” is often thought of as something to be avoided, recent research suggests that mind-wandering may help to commit memories to long-term storage, a process known as memory consolidation. Mind-wandering and memory consolidation are typically studied separately, but new evidence suggests that these two mental processes use the same neural resources: specifically, the ‘reactivation’ of memories in the brain’s hippocampus region and the activation of a set of connected brain regions known as the default mode network. This project involves development of a new approach based on real-time brain imaging that aims to better understand whether memory consolidation has an impact on the content of spontaneous thoughts—and in turn, whether mind-wandering impacts memory consolidation. The overall goals are to develop a new tool and to advance understanding of how memories are retained for the long term. Additionally, this work includes STEM training and education for undergraduate and graduate students. The project addresses a specific problem that stems from a known feature of reactivation of memory events in the hippocampus: these events support memory consolidation but occur spontaneously at unpredictable times. Given this unpredictability, it is difficult to obtain samples of thoughts or behaviors at the precise time that these reactivation events occur. The goal of this research is to develop a new approach, based on real-time analysis of neuroimaging data, that allows precise alignment in time between memory reactivation events, activation in the default mode network, and samples of thought. In a computational simulation as well as an experiment conducted in human participants, the research uses analyses of multivariate patterns to detect reactivation events in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data. The project focuses on verifying that this method can be used in a valid manner within a real-time analysis system to trigger samples of thought that are aligned in time to neural reactivations. Taken together, the research looks to deliver a new tool that can be applied to determine when and how spontaneous thoughts may help or harm the formation of memories, potentially leading to further development of real-time neural measures to trigger interventions for enhancing learning and memory. 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.