The SWE colloquium on Thursday 10 December (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Maria Wimber, Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham School of Psychology. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.

Memory recall as a dynamic and reconstructive process

Our memories are not static. Each attempt to recall a past event can adaptively change the underlying memory space. Here I discuss my work on the neurocognitive mechanisms that enable the selective retrieval of episodic memories. I present behavioural and electrophysiological (M/EEG) work that provides insight into how the mnemonic reconstruction process unfolds in time, on a sub-trial scale. Further, I show evidence from a series of fMRI studies in which we track the representational changes that occur in a memory trace over time and across repeated retrievals. The latter findings demonstrate that retrieval adaptively modifies memories by strengthening behaviourally relevant and weakening behaviourally irrelevant, interfering components. Together, this work sheds light onto the neural dynamics of the retrieval process, and informs theories of adaptive memory.