Project Summary
This project aims to unlock the potential of combining wearable mobile recording devices, such as
smartphones with continuous audio-visual, accelerometry, GPS, subjective report, autonomic physiology, and
wearable eye tracking recordings, with precisely synchronized intracranial neural recordings during real-world
behaviors. Autobiographical memory (AM) formation is a critical human behavior that has been difficult to study
with traditional neuroimaging methods. It involves a range of real-world cognitive processes, including
attention, decision making, emotion, episodic memory, social interactions, and navigation. AM refers to
memory for one’s own life experiences. AMs are typically more detailed and personal than general episodic
memories and due to this feature have thus been difficult to capture as they are being formed, particularly the
neural correlates of AM encoding. By studying how the brain processes, encodes, and retrieves verifiable,
real-world autobiographical experiences, we hope to gain new insights into cognitive and neural processes that
can fail in neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. There is a critical need to develop technical,
methodological, and computational approaches to understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms
underlying memory-related behaviors in continuous, complex real-world settings, to then translate this
understanding into reliable treatments for enhancing memory or cognition in daily life. The proposed project will
take important first steps towards addressing these dire needs with a novel and unique approach to recording
directly from the human brain as people navigate and create AMs in the temporal contexts and at the spatial
scales of daily life. By capturing electrophysiological recordings synchronized with a novel experiential
recording device, our project will take the key translational step needed to push our neuroscientific insights of
autobiographical memory from the laboratory to one day restoring real-world memory for those suffering from
devastating memory disorders. As neural stimulation tools and techniques for memory enhancement develop,
insights from the proposed study will establish the foundation on which to build neuromodulation approaches
that can rescue memory during real-world experiences. Thus the proposed research project aims to develop a
smartphone-based recording application (CAPTURE app; R61 phase) synchronized with wearables and
invasive neural recordings during real-world behaviors like autobiographical memory encoding (R33 phase).
We will develop novel recording and analytic methods for integrating multimodal data streams with invasive
neural recordings in humans during real-world experiences. Over 2,000 potential research participants have
sensing and stimulation devices (i.e., NeuroPace Responsive Neurostimulation System; RNS) chronically
implanted in their brains for the treatment of epilepsy in the U.S. Our next-generation tool and approach will
allow us to precisely capture real-world behaviors that encompass a variety of cognitive processes like
autobiographical memory formation, and synchronize this data with direct neural recordings in humans.
