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Context in the wild: Environment, behavior, and the brain

Sreekumar, Vishnu
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1447539252

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Psychology.
Context is an important construct in many domains of cognition including learning and memory, and is typically operationally defined by referring to a study list, aspects of the experimental task or the physical attributes of the laboratory environment. However, it is unclear to what extent the contexts used in the laboratory resemble those that people typically experience outside the laboratory which brings into question generality of memory results obtained in the laboratory. Today, devices such as smartphones which can record different sensor streams of data allow us to rigorously quantify everyday human experience. I used these data to characterize context and memory in the “real-world” using a three-pronged approach: 1) applied dynamical systems and network analysis methods to describe the structure and dynamics of context, 2) employed quantitative modeling of behavioral memory data to determine how people isolate the time of occurrence of personal events, and 3) used neuroimaging to investigate the neural correlates of context. The dynamical systems analyses revealed a natural separation between the scales over which within-context and between-context relationships operate and this organization was preserved across domains of experience (e.g. visual experience, personal discourse) demonstrating the episodic nature of experience. While previous work has emphasized the role of recall-based reconstructive processes in people’s ability to isolate when events occurred, quantitative modeling of week discrimination performance suggests that people rely heavily on a temporal distance-based mechanism. Finally, neuroimaging results point to the left anterior hippocampus as being the locus of real-world spatiotemporal context representations in the brain. Furthermore, a whole-brain searchlight analysis revealed that subjective content is generally reinstated in a network of regions consistent with already established “personal semantics” networks and critically, patterns of activation in the right precuneous distinguish vivid from non-vivid reminiscence. The fMRI results support the view that the precuneous is a hub within the default mode network. This dissertation represents one of the first attempts to extensively characterize context and memory in the wild.
Per Sederberg, Ph.D. (Advisor)
Alexander Petrov, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Jay Myung, Ph.D (Committee Member)
214 p.
Cognitive Psychology; Neurosciences; Psychology

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Sreekumar, V. (2015). Context in the wild: Environment, behavior, and the brain [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1447539252

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Sreekumar, Vishnu. Context in the wild: Environment, behavior, and the brain. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1447539252.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Sreekumar, Vishnu. "Context in the wild: Environment, behavior, and the brain." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1447539252

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1447539252
565
© 2015, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.
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