SenseCam: A new tool for memory rehabilitation?

The emergence of life-logging technologies has led neuropsychologist to focus on understanding how this new technology could help patients with memory disorders. Despite the growing number of studies using life-logging technologies, a theoretical framework supporting its effectiveness is lacking. This review focuses on the use of life-logging in the context of memory rehabilitation, particularly the use of SenseCam, a wearable camera allowing passive image capture. In our opinion, reviewing SenseCam images can be effective for memory rehabilitation only if it provides more than an assessment of prior occurrence in ways that reinstates previous thoughts, feelings and sensory information, thus stimulating recollection. Considering the fact that, in memory impairment, self-initiated processes are impaired, we propose that the environmental support hypothesis can explain the value of SenseCam for memory retrieval. Twenty-five research studies were selected for this review and despite the general acceptance of the value of SenseCam as a memory technique, only a small number of studies focused on recollection. We discuss the usability of this tool to improve episodic memory and in particular, recollectio

'Spotlight on the survival processing advantage': An fNIRS study on adaptive memory

In the present study, participants had to rate words for their relevance in an ancestral survival scenario (e.g., is bottle relevant in the fictious scenario of being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without basic supplies) and for their pleasantness (e.g., is bottle a pleasant word?). A distractor task lasting a few minutes followed and the participants were then tested on their recall of the words. We used fNIRS to bilaterally monitor the dorsolateral-prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, known to be involved in strategic encoding) during the processing of verbal material in these two deep encoding situations. At the behavioral level, we replicated the survival processing advantage in recall rates, with the result that words processed for their survival value were better remembered than words processed for their pleasantness value. Importantly, at the neural level, we observed a lesser activation of the DLPFC during verbal encoding in the pleasantness condition compared to the survival condition, thus supporting the hypothesis that the survival processing advantage is underpinned by effortful processes, and more specifically relational processing