Dartmouth Events

Please join us for a colloquium in Moore BO3 on Thursday, March 6, 2025, starting at 1:05 p.m., given by Alison Preston, Dr. A. Wilson Nolle and Sir Raghunath P. Mahendroo Professor and Vice Provost for Faculty Development at University of Texas at Austin.

Title:  Hippocampal and Frontoparietal Function Underlie Developmental Shifts in Knowledge Acquisition and Decision Making

Abstract: Hippocampus structure and connectivity with frontoparietal regions develop into adolescence, a period associated with substantial gains in memory and reasoning. While such structural changes are well documented, we know less about the functions that hippocampal and frontoparietal development confer, fundamentally limiting mechanistic understanding of how children and adolescents learn and reason about the world. From early life, children can learn simple associations that they directly experience. However, with age, memory becomes more complex, reflecting not only directly observed information, but also knowledge derived across multiple episodes. Such derived knowledge is hierarchical, representing generalities across experiences while simultaneously exaggerating important differences between them. Hierarchical cognitive maps thus support inference decisions about event relationships, while also preserving detailed memory for when and where those relationships might vary by context. In this talk, I will discuss a series of developmental studies leveraging behavior, computational modeling, and functional MRI quantify the neurocognitive mechanisms that support gains in associative, temporal, and spatial memory through childhood and adolescence. I will show that hippocampal, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and lateral parietal cortex (LPC) representation undergoes qualitative changes during development, shifting from representing simple, individual associations to a system that extracts hierarchical knowledge about the relationships between experiences. I will further show developmental differences in hippocampal error signaling drive age-related differences in memory updating that predict developmental differences in behavior. I will also show that hippocampal representations reflect simple associations in children and adolescents, while the mature hippocampus and vmPFC code inferred, generalizable knowledge. Finally, I will show developmental differences in how LPC mediates flexible decision making that draws upon learned cognitive maps.

Coffee, tea, and cider donuts will be available a few minutes before and after the talk in the foyer space outside of Moore BO3.