Medial Temporal Lobe Volume Predicts Elders’ Everyday Memory

Deficits in memory for everyday activities are common complaints among healthy and demented older adults. The medial temporal lobes and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are both affected by aging and early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, and are known to influence performance on laboratory memory tasks. We investigated whether the volume of these structures predicts everyday memory. Cognitively healthy older adults and older adults with mild Alzheimer’s-type dementia watched movies of everyday activities and completed memory tests on the activities. Structural MRI was used to measure brain volume. Medial temporal but not prefrontal volume strongly predicted subsequent memory. Everyday memory depends on segmenting activity into discrete events during perception, and medial temporal volume partially accounted for the relationship between performance on the memory tests and performance on an event-segmentation task. The everyday-memory measures used in this study involve retrieval of episodic and semantic information as well as working memory updating. Thus, the current findings suggest that during perception, the medial temporal lobes support the construction of event representations that determine subsequent memory

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Posttraumatic Stress and the Comprehension of Everyday Activity

People with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often report difficulties with attention and memory on tasks that are unrelated to their trauma. One important component of everyday event comprehension is the segmentation of ongoing activity into meaningful events. The present study asked whether PTSD symptom severity was associated with impaired segmentation and memory for neutral, ongoing activity. A sample of 137 participants, ages 21–79, completed event segmentation and memory tasks, general ­cognitive functioning tasks, and questionnaires assessing PTSD symptom severity. People with higher levels of PTSD symptoms had poorer event segmentation and event memory performance. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that PTSD symptom severity explained unique variance in event segmentation performance, even after controlling for general cognitive function. These results suggest that interventions aimed at improving event comprehension may help compensate for memory disruptions in PTSD

Attentional focus affects how events are segmented and updated in narrative reading

This repository archives materials used in the following publication: Bailey, H. R., Kurby, C. A., Sargent, J. Q., & Zacks, J. M. (2017). Attentional focus affects how events are segmented and updated in narrative reading. Memory & cognition, 45(6), 940-955. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (see license.txt for details

Event Memory Uniquely Predicts Memory for Large-Scale Space

When a person explores a new environment, they begin to construct a spatial representation of it. Doing so is important for navigating and remaining oriented. How does one’s ability to learn a new environment relate to one’s ability to remember experiences in that environment? Here, 208 adults experienced a first-person videotaped route, and then completed a spatial map construction task. They also took tests of general cognitive abilities (working memory, laboratory episodic memory, processing speed, general knowledge) and of memory for familiar, everyday activities (event memory). Regression analyses revealed that event memory (memory for everyday events and their temporal structure), laboratory episodic memory (memory for words and pictures) and gender were unique predictors of spatial memory. These results implicate the processing of temporal structure and organization as an important cognitive ability in large-scale spatial memory from route experience. Accounting for the temporal structure of people’s experience while learning the layout of novel spaces may improve interventions for addressing navigation problems

Event Memory Uniquely Predicts Memory for Large-Scale Space

When a person explores a new environment, they begin to construct a spatial representation of it. Doing so is important for navigating and remaining oriented. How does one’s ability to learn a new environment relate to one’s ability to remember experiences in that environment? Here, 208 adults experienced a first-person videotaped route, and then completed a spatial map construction task. They also took tests of general cognitive abilities (working memory, laboratory episodic memory, processing speed, general knowledge) and of memory for familiar, everyday activities (event memory). Regression analyses revealed that event memory (memory for everyday events and their temporal structure), laboratory episodic memory (memory for words and pictures) and gender were unique predictors of spatial memory. These results implicate the processing of temporal structure and organization as an important cognitive ability in large-scale spatial memory from route experience. Accounting for the temporal structure of people’s experience while learning the layout of novel spaces may improve interventions for addressing navigation problems

Aging and event segmentation: An fMRI investigation of individual differences in event perception and memory.

People spontaneously segment activities into discrete events, and such segmentation is associated with an increase in activity in a collection of brain regions including posterior cortex and lateral frontal cortex. Some individuals segment more normatively than others, and those people also remember more about the activity afterwards. The current study investigated whether individual differences in segmentation and event memory are related to individual differences in brain response to event boundaries, and age-differences in such relations. Consistent with previous research, older adults performed worse on behavioral measures of segmentation and memory than younger adults. Also consistent with previous research, regions in posterior cortex and lateral prefrontal cortex increased in activity around event boundaries. These brain responses did not differ with age, and the behavioral measures were unrelated to the evoked brain responses. Analyses assessing inter-subject agreement in brain response across time revealed an association with segmentation ability. These results suggest that much of the neural response correlated with event boundaries is robust to individual differences and age-related change