Schedule of Events | Symposia

ESTIMATING MEMORY FUNCTION BY MEASURING THE HEMISPHERIC SPECIALISATION OF ATTENTION ALLOCATION

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Daniela Montaldi¹ (daniela.montaldi@manchester.ac.uk), Oliver Gray, Charlotte Hunt, Haoran Guan; ¹University of Manchester

Recall of perceptually rich experiences can prompt a vivid perceptual re-experience. In contrast, a recall experience characterised by semantic features is often perceptually-impoverished and instead prompts the retrieval of associated semantic information. The inferior parietal lobule contributes to the retrieval of episodic memories and shows a hemispheric lateralisation of function that specifically relates to the qualitative distinction between perceptual and semantic memory experiences. The IPL also contributes to the healthy allocation of spatial attention. Importantly, this spatial attention function also exhibits hemispheric lateralisation. We recently developed two complementary landmark tasks to reliably measure this spatial attention lateralisation and explore its qualitative similarity to the lateralisation observed in memory. We directly assessed the relationship between the hemispheric lateralisation of memory and attention functions in young adults . We then investigated whether these relationships are informative of the memory abilities of older participants. Participants (N=187; 82 female) aged 35-73 were recruited. They were presented with four blocks containing an object study task, a line-based landmark task, an object-based landmark task, and a Yes/No object recognition memory task with similar lures. Hemispheric lateralisation of spatial attention allocation, as measured by two landmark tasks, was found to be closely related to the ability to recollect perceptually-rich memory experiences. We show that it is feasible to estimate recollection memory performance by measuring the hemispheric lateralisation of spatial attention allocation. We also better characterise spatial attention in the presence of semantic information revealing how the allocation of spatial attention and episodic memory retrieval changes with age.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic