Projects

The latter corresponds to memory for data and information with no clear temporal and spatial context, such as the names of the teachers during childhood, names of family members or friends. Episodic autobiographical memory entails the recollection of the event from a specific time and place, the re-experiencing of contextual details and awareness of the self as a continuous entity across time. The core hypothesis of ATENA is the idea that previous experiences are spatially organized into a cognitive map and that temporal coding indexes the content of such a map.

Time processing actually involves a number of separate phenomena, from the processing of millisecond information involved in motor control and speech discrimination, to the ability to mentally project ourselves in the past and in the future and to temporally organize our memories along the timescale of years.

or to create an interconnected network among different paths. The hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex support the formation of map-like spatial representations, thanks to the presence in the hippocampal-entorhinal system of a set of cells with spatial properties, including (1) place cells, which fire as a function of the spatial position of the animal, (2) grid cells, which fire in a regular hexagonal lattice of locations tiling the floor of the environment, and (3) border cells, which fire when the animal is at set distances from navigational boundaries at specific directions. These mechanisms have been recently proposed to support the development of cognitive spaces as a domain-general format for high-level cognition in humans. Interestingly, environmental navigation and autobiographical memory commonly activate the parahippocampal gyrus and middle hippocampus, posterior cingulate cortex and right angular gyrus, but also involve distinct brain regions.