Projects

Leverhulme Trust funded project on music and autobiographical memory 

Dr Kelly Jakubowski is leading a project on the prevalence, features, and factors that influence the generation of music-evoked autobiographical memories. One aim of this work is to elucidate whether music has a unique ability to evoke qualitatively different memories than other common perceptual cues and, if so, what the explanatory factors underlying these differences might be. This work will also critically assess the validity of anecdotal claims about 'the power of music' by providing empirical evidence on the specific circumstances under which music may be an effective cue for vivid and emotional lifetime memories. The project is funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. 

Content Based Descriptions of Episodic Memory in Children 

Professor Alex Easton was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship to explore the ways in which rodent models of episodic memory can be adapted for use in children. This will allow us to explore memory in very young children and in children with developmental disorders that may be impacted by the tests typically used to assess episodic memory. 

Vector Trace Cells in the Subiculum of the Hippocampal Formation 

Colin Lever and Steven Poulter have recently received BBSRC funding to work on Vector Trace Cells, a new cell type they recently discovered in the subiculum. Successfully navigating in physical or semantic space requires a neural representation of allocentric (map based) vectors to boundaries, objects and goals. Cognitive processes such as path planning and imagination entail recall of vector representations, but evidence of neuron-level memory for allocentric vectors has been lacking. The firing of a Vector Trace Cell (VTC) generates a new vector field when a cue is encountered, and also a trace version of that field for hours after cue removal.