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1: Neuron. 2006 Jul 20;51(2):263-74.
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Functional-anatomic correlates of individual differences in memory.

Kirchhoff BA, Buckner RL.

Department of Psychology, Washington University, Campus Box 1125, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, and Martinos Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston 02129, USA. bkirchho@artsci.wustl.edu

Memory abilities differ greatly across individuals. To explore a source of these differences, we characterized the varied strategies people adopt during unconstrained encoding. Participants intentionally encoded object pairs during functional MRI. Principal components analysis applied to a strategy questionnaire revealed that participants variably used four main strategies to aid learning. Individuals' use of verbal elaboration and visual inspection strategies independently correlated with their memory performance. Verbal elaboration correlated with activity in a network of regions that included prefrontal regions associated with controlled verbal processing, while visual inspection correlated with activity in a network of regions that included an extrastriate region associated with object processing. Activity in regions associated with use of these strategies was also correlated with memory performance. This study reveals functional-anatomic correlates of verbal and perceptual strategies that are variably used by individuals during encoding. These strategies engage distinct brain regions and may separately influence memory performance.

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PMID: 16846860 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]