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The Journal of Neuroscience, June 24, 2009, 29(25):8270-8279; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1043-09.2009
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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Selecting for Memory? The Influence of Selective Attention on the Mnemonic Binding of Contextual Information
Melina R. Uncapher1 andMichael D. Rugg2,3 1Stanford Memory Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, and 2Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and 3Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California 92697
Correspondence should be addressed to Melina R. Uncapher, Stanford Memory Laboratory, Stanford University, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford, CA 94305-2130. Email: melina.u{at}stanford.edu
Not all of what is experienced is remembered later. Behavioral evidence suggests that the manner in which an event is processed influences which aspects of the event will later be remembered. The present experiment investigated the neural correlates of "selective encoding," or the mechanisms that support the encoding of some elements of an event in preference to others. Event-related MRI data were acquired while volunteers selectively attended to one of two different contextual features of study items (color or location). A surprise memory test for the items and both contextual features was subsequently administered to determine the influence of selective attention on the neural correlates of contextual encoding. Activity in several cortical regions indexed later memory success selectively for color or location information, and this encoding-related activity was enhanced by selective attention to the relevant feature. Critically, a region in the hippocampus responded selectively to attended source information (whether color or location), demonstrating encoding-related activity for attended but not for nonattended source features. Together, the findings suggest that selective attention modulates the magnitude of activity in cortical regions engaged by different aspects of an event, and hippocampal encoding mechanisms seem to be sensitive to this modulation. Thus, the information that is encoded into a memory representation is biased by selective attention, and this bias is mediated by cortical–hippocampal interactions.
Received March 3, 2009; revised April 15, 2009; accepted April 20, 2009.
Correspondence should be addressed to Melina R. Uncapher, Stanford Memory Laboratory, Stanford University, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford, CA 94305-2130. Email: melina.u{at}stanford.edu
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