Achievement

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become a central tool in cognitive neuroscience research, but fMRI scanner time is expensive. IGERT funding has allowed Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh to provide opportunities for students to design and run their own fMRI experiments. A recent experiment by IGERT student Christopher Paynter, working with his advisor Lynne Reder, used fMRI to study an aspect of human memory known as repetition priming. Subjects were presented with a series of pictures while in the scanner, some of which were exact duplicates, while others were second instances of the same concept. Paynter found that for identical pictures, greater attenuation in fusiform and IT cortex correlated with better recall afterward, but the opposite was true for pictures that were merely in the same semantic category. This reveals a distinction between perceptual vs. conceptual memory encodings. A paper on these findings is currently in press at NeuroImage.