Search

Since its national debut in 1987, Fresh Air with Terry Gross has been a highly acclaimed and much adored weekday magazine among public radio listeners. Each week, nearly 4.8 million people turn to Peabody Award-winning host Terry Gross for insightful conversations with the leading voices in contemporary arts and issues. The renowned program reaches a global audience, with over 620 public radio stations broadcasting Fresh Air, and 3 million podcast downloads each week. Fresh Air has broken the mold of 'talk show' by weaving together superior journalism and intimate storytelling from modern-day intellectuals, politicians and artists alike. Through probing questions and careful research, Gross's interviews are lauded for revealing a fresh perspective on cultural icons and trends. Her thorough conversations are often complemented by commentary from well-known contributors. Fresh Air is produced at WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and broadcast nationally by NPR., (1.) British neuroscientist DEAN BURNETT. He teaches at Cardiff University and writes the Brainflapping blog for The Guardian. BURNETT is author of the new book Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To.(2.) Comic ALI WONG. She recently had her first comedy special Baby Cobra in May on Netflix. She was 7 months pregnant when she recorded it and has since given birth to a baby girl. WONG has been doing comedy for 11 years. She is also a writer on the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. (INTERVIEW BY PRODUCER ANN MARIE BALDONADO).

Contemporary theories of animal learning propose that memory for a specific event can be based upon either an elemental network of associations, a configural associative network or a hybrid of these possibilities. The two aims of this thesis were (1) to assess whether rats form configural representations of the spatiotemporal features of specific cues, and (2) to test the hypothesis that the hippocampus plays a critical role in configural representations that encode the spatiotemporal properties of an event, more commonly known as episodic memory. Chapter 2 investigated rats' ability to represent the spatiotemporal context in which objects were presented. These experiments failed to find robust evidence for such an ability. Chapter 3 discusses the development of a novel task, based on a sensory preconditioning procedure, that demonstrated configural memory for the spatiotemporal features of auditory cues in normal rats. In addition, it was shown that excitotoxic lesions of the hippocampus disrupted such configural memories. The experiments reported in Chapter 4 used the procedure developed in Chapter 3 to show that temporary inactivation of the hippocampus during memory retrieval disrupted configural, but not elemental memory retrieval. The results presented in this thesis support the hypothesis that normal rats are able to form elemental and configural representations involving the spatiotemporal properties of cues, and that the hippocampus has a role in configural but not elemental associative memory.

Contemporary theories of animal learning propose that memory for a specific event can be based upon either an elemental network of associations, a configural associative network or a hybrid of these possibilities. The two aims of this thesis were (1) to assess whether rats form configural representations of the spatiotemporal features of specific cues, and (2) to test the hypothesis that the hippocampus plays a critical role in configural representations that encode the spatiotemporal properties of an event, more commonly known as episodic memory. Chapter 2 investigated rats' ability to represent the spatiotemporal context in which objects were presented. These experiments failed to find robust evidence for such an ability. Chapter 3 discusses the development of a novel task, based on a sensory preconditioning procedure, that demonstrated configural memory for the spatiotemporal features of auditory cues in normal rats. In addition, it was shown that excitotoxic lesions of the hippocampus disrupted such configural memories. The experiments reported in Chapter 4 used the procedure developed in Chapter 3 to show that temporary inactivation of the hippocampus during memory retrieval disrupted configural, but not elemental memory retrieval. The results presented in this thesis support the hypothesis that normal rats are able to form elemental and configural representations involving the spatiotemporal properties of cues, and that the hippocampus has a role in configural but not elemental associative memory.