| Professor Ken A.
Paller Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Program and the Training Program in the Neuroscience of Human Cognition Fellow of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center |
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Department of
Psychology Northwestern University 2029 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208-2710 USA |
kap Office: 210 Cresap Office Phone: 847/467-3370 Dept Fax: 847/491-7859 Lab Phone: 847/491-7725 |
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 Brain-wave animation |
 Consciousness East and West |
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A central type of memory currently under study is conscious recollection, which is associated with memory for facts and events. This is the experience most people would associate with remembering. Another type of memory, perceptual priming, is generally measured as a facilitation in performance on implicit memory tests -- in these tests subjects are not necessarily aware that memory is being tested. Juxtapositions of recollection and priming serve to illuminate the ways in which these two types of memory differ in both their cognitive and neural facets.
Evidence from Neuropsychology suggests that anterograde amnesia, which can occur following damage to midline diencephalic or medial temporal brain regions, involves a disruption of recollection while sparing priming. Many theoretical explanations for this dissociation have been put forward. One possibility is that amnesia arises due to a disruption of a special process ("cross-cortical consolidation"), that is specifically required for memory storage with respect to facts and events.
Functional Neuroimaging (using PET or FMRI methods) has been used to obtain images of brain areas active during normal cognition. These methods can also be used in patients with amnesia to show how focal brain damage can disrupt functioning in distant brain locations. Results from neuroimaging in the coming years may thus be helpful for clarifying the critical roles played by particular brain areas in encoding, storage, and retrieval.
Measures of the electrophysiological activity of the brain, such as event-related potentials or ERPs, can also be very useful. In my laboratory, ERPs are recorded noninvasively to monitor human brain activity that occurs in association with various memory functions. These brain potentials provide real-time measures of neural information processing with an unsurpassed degree of temporal precision. Recent results from my laboratory have shown that particular brain potentials are associated with memory retrieval during recollection, with certain aspects of strategic retrieval, and with priming.
Paller, K.A. (2008, in press). Memory consolidation systems. In L.R. Squire, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Oxford: Academic Press.
Voss, J.L., & Paller, K.A. (2008). Accurate forced-choice recognition without awareness of memory retrieval. Learning & Memory, 15, 454-459.
Paller, K.A., Boehm, S.G., & Voss, J.L. (2007). Validating neural correlates of familiarity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 243-250.
Li, W., Moallem, I., Paller, K.A., & Gottfried, J.A. (2007). Unconscious smells can guide social preferences. Psychological Science, 18, 1044-1049.
Voss, J.L., & Paller, K.A. (2007). Neural correlates of conceptual implicit memory and their contamination of putative neural correlates of explicit memory. Learning & Memory, 14, 259-267.
Voss, J.L., & Paller, K.A. (2006). Fluent conceptual processing and explicit memory for faces are electrophysiologically distinct. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 926-933.
Westerberg, C.E., Paller, K.A., Weintraub, S., Mesulam, M.-M, Holdstock, J.S., Mayes, A.R., & Reber, P.J. (2006). When memory does not fail: Familiarity-based recognition in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. Neuropsychology, 20, 193-205.
Paller, K.A., & Voss, J.L. (2004). Memory reactivation and consolidation during sleep. Learning & Memory, 11, 664-670.
Gonsalves, B., Reber, P.J., Gitelman, D.R., Parrish, T.B., Mesulam, M.-M., & Paller, K.A. (2004). Neural evidence that vivid imagining can lead to false remembering. Psychological Science, 15, 655-660.
Paller, K.A. (2004). Electrical signals of memory and of the awareness of remembering. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 49-55.
Yovel, G., & Paller, K.A. (2004). The neural basis of the butcher-on-the-bus phenomenon: When a face seems familiar but is not remembered. NeuroImage, 21, 789-800.
Paller, K.A., Hutson, C.A., Miller, B.B., & Boehm, S.G. (2003). Neural manifestations of remembering with and without awareness. Neuron, 38, 507-516.
Paller, K.A., Ranganath, C., Gonsalves, B., LaBar, K.S., Parrish, T.B., Gitelman, D.R., Mesulam, M.-M., & Reber, P.J. (2003). Neural correlates of person recognition. Learning & Memory, 10, 253-260.
Gonsalves, B., & Paller, K.A. (2002). Mistaken memories: Remembering events that never happened. The Neuroscientist, 8, 391-395.
Paller, K.A., & Wagner, A.D. (2002). Observing the transformation of experience into memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 93-102.
Paller, K.A. (2002). Cross-cortical consolidation as the core defect in amnesia: Prospects for hypothesis-testing with neuropsychology and neuroimaging. In: L.R. Squire and D.L. Schacter (Eds.), The Neuropsychology of Memory(3rd ed., pp. 73-87). New York: Guilford Press.
Paller, K.A., & McCarthy, G. (2002). Field potentials in the human hippocampus during the encoding and recognition of visual stimuli. Hippocampus, 12,415-420.
Reber, P.J., Siwiec, R.M., Gitelman, D.R., Parrish, T.B., Mesulam, M.-M., & Paller, K.A. (2002). Neural correlates of successful encoding identified using fMRI. Journal of Neuroscience, 22,9541-9548.
Paller, K.A. (2001). Neurocognitive foundations of human memory. In: D.L. Medin (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation,Volume 40 (pp. 121-145). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Gonsalves, B., & Paller, K.A. (2000a). Brain potentials associated with recollective processing of spoken words. Memory & Cognition, 28,321-330.
Gonsalves, B., & Paller, K.A. (2000b). Neural events that underlie remembering something that never happened. Nature Neuroscience, 3,1316-1321.
Paller, K.A., Gonsalves, B., Grabowecky, M., Bozic, V.S., & Yamada, S. (2000). Electrophysiological correlates of recollecting faces of known and unknown individuals. NeuroImage, 11,98-110.
Paller, K.A., Bozic, V.S., Ranganath, C., Grabowecky, M., & Yamada, S. (1999). Brain waves following remembered faces index conscious recollection. Cognitive Brain Research, 7,559-571.
Ranganath, C., & Paller, K.A. (1999b). Frontal brain potentials during recognition are modulated by requirements to retrieve perceptual detail. Neuron, 22,605-613. [Reviewed by Donaldson and Buckner (1999)]
Paller, K.A. (1997). Consolidating dispersed neocortical memories: The missing link in amnesia. Memory, 5,73-88.
Paller, K.A., Kutas, M., & Mayes, A.R. (1987). Neural correlates of encoding in an incidental learning paradigm. Psychophysiology, 67,360-371.