Eleanor Maguire | |
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Born | Dublin, Ireland | 27 March 1970
Nationality | Irish |
Alma mater | University College Dublin (BA, PhD) University of Wales, Swansea (MSc) |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | [ ProQuest 301509150 Real-world spatial memory following temporal-lobe surgery in humans] (1994) |
Doctoral students | Demis Hassabis [1] |
Website | iris |
Eleanor Anne Maguire FRS FMedSci FBA MRIA (born 27 March 1970) [2] is an Irish neuroscientist. Since 2007, she has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London [3] [4] [5] [6] where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. [7] [8]
Maguire was born in Dublin, Ireland. [2] She studied psychology at University College Dublin and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA Hons) degree in 1990. [2] She studied Clinical and experimental neuropsychology at University of Wales, Swansea and graduated with a Master of Science degree in 1991. [6] [2] She undertook her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at University College Dublin, [9] [10] Ireland, where she first became interested in the neural basis of memory while working with patients as a neuropsychologist at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin. She completed her PhD in 1994, [9] and her doctoral thesis was titled Real-world spatial memory following temporal-lobe surgery in humans. [9]
Maguire is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow [7] and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, [11] UK, where she is also the Deputy Director. Maguire heads the Memory and Space research laboratory at the Centre. In addition, she is an honorary member of the Department of Neuropsychology, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London.
Maguire and others have noted that a distributed set of brain regions supports human episodic (autobiographical) memory, defined as the memory for personal everyday events, [12] and that this brain network overlaps considerably with that supporting navigation in large-scale space and other diverse cognitive functions such as imagination and thinking about the future. [13] In her research Maguire seeks to place episodic memory in the context of wider cognition so as to understand how common brain areas, and possibly common processes, support such disparate functions. In this way she hopes to gain novel and fundamental insights into the mechanisms that are involved. [11]
Her team uses standard whole brain and high resolution structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging in conjunction with behavioural testing and neuropsychological examination of amnesic patients to pursue their aims. They mainly employ ecologically valid or 'real life' experimental paradigms to examine brain-behaviour relationships; examples include using virtual reality to examine navigation, [14] [15] investigating autobiographical memories of people's personal past experiences, and their ability to imagine fictitious and future scenes and events. Perhaps the most famous of these is her series of studies on London taxi drivers, [16] [17] [18] where she documented changes in hippocampal structure associated with acquiring the knowledge of London's layout. A redistribution of grey matter was indicated in London Taxi Drivers compared to controls. This work on hippocampal plasticity not only interested scientists, but also engaged the public and media world-wide.
This is also true of her other work such as that showing that patients with amnesia cannot imagine the future [19] which several years ago was rated as one of the scientific breakthroughs of the year; [20] and her other studies demonstrating that it is possible to decode people's memories from the pattern of fMRI activity in the hippocampus. [21] [22]
Maguire's interest is mainly focused on the hippocampus, a brain structure known to be crucial for learning and memory, whilst also exploring the roles of the parahippocampal cortex, the retrosplenial cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. [22] [23] [24] [25] She has supervised numerous doctoral students including Demis Hassabis. [1]
Besides her direct scientific activities, Maguire and her research group have an active public engagement agenda, involving public lectures, school visits and demonstrations, TV, radio and internet contributions, and collaborations with several artists, encouraging people of all ages to think about the value of science in their everyday lives. In February 2014, Maguire delivered a Friday Evening Discourse at The Royal Institution. [26]
Maguire has won a number of prizes for outstanding contributions to science, including:
She was also named as one of 'Twenty Europeans who have changed our lives’ when The European Union launched a new science and innovation initiative several years ago. In 2011, Maguire was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) and, in 2016, a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). [32]
In 2017 she was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA) [33] and in July 2018 was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). [34]
Maguire's entry in Who's Who lists her recreations as "Comedy lover, long-suffering supporter of Crystal Palace Football Club, getting lost." [2]
The entorhinal cortex (EC) is an area of the brain's allocortex, located in the medial temporal lobe, whose functions include being a widespread network hub for memory, navigation, and the perception of time. The EC is the main interface between the hippocampus and neocortex. The EC-hippocampus system plays an important role in declarative (autobiographical/episodic/semantic) memories and in particular spatial memories including memory formation, memory consolidation, and memory optimization in sleep. The EC is also responsible for the pre-processing (familiarity) of the input signals in the reflex nictitating membrane response of classical trace conditioning; the association of impulses from the eye and the ear occurs in the entorhinal cortex.
The hippocampus is a major component of the brain of humans and other vertebrates. Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, and plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation. The hippocampus is located in the allocortex, with neural projections into the neocortex, in humans as well as other primates. The hippocampus, as the medial pallium, is a structure found in all vertebrates. In humans, it contains two main interlocking parts: the hippocampus proper, and the dentate gyrus.
The limbic system, also known as the paleomammalian cortex, is a set of brain structures located on both sides of the thalamus, immediately beneath the medial temporal lobe of the cerebrum primarily in the forebrain.
Brodmann area 9, or BA9, refers to a cytoarchitecturally defined portion of the frontal cortex in the brain of humans and other primates. Its cytoarchitecture is referred to as granular due to the concentration of granule cells in layer IV. It contributes to the dorsolateral and medial prefrontal cortex.
Episodic memory is the memory of everyday events that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at particular times and places; for example, the party on one's 7th birthday. Along with semantic memory, it comprises the category of explicit memory, one of the two major divisions of long-term memory.
Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity or brain plasticity, is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization. It is when the brain is rewired to function in some way that differs from how it previously functioned. These changes range from individual neuron pathways making new connections, to systematic adjustments like cortical remapping or neural oscillation. Other forms of neuroplasticity include homologous area adaptation, cross modal reassignment, map expansion, and compensatory masquerade. Examples of neuroplasticity include circuit and network changes that result from learning a new ability, information acquisition, environmental influences, practice, and psychological stress.
Affective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate within the field of affective neuroscience.
Michael Hasselmo is an American neuroscientist and professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. He is the director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience and is editor-in-chief of Hippocampus (journal). Hasselmo studies oscillatory dynamics and neuromodulatory regulation in cortical mechanisms for memory guided behavior and spatial navigation using a combination of neurophysiological and behavioral experiments in conjunction with computational modeling. In addition to his peer-reviewed publications, Hasselmo wrote the book How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory.
Voxel-based morphometry is a computational approach to neuroanatomy that measures differences in local concentrations of brain tissue, through a voxel-wise comparison of multiple brain images.
The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is a cortical area in the brain comprising Brodmann areas 29 and 30. It is secondary association cortex, making connections with numerous other brain regions. The region's name refers to its anatomical location immediately behind the splenium of the corpus callosum in primates, although in rodents it is located more towards the brain surface and is relatively larger. Its function is currently not well understood, but its location close to visual areas and also to the hippocampal spatial/memory system suggest it may have a role in mediating between perceptual and memory functions, particularly in the spatial domain. However, its exact contribution to either space or memory processing has been hard to pin down.
Anna Christina Nobre FBA, MAE, fNASc is a Brazilian and British cognitive neuroscientist working at Yale University in New Haven, CT, USA.
Recognition memory, a subcategory of explicit memory, is the ability to recognize previously encountered events, objects, or people. When the previously experienced event is reexperienced, this environmental content is matched to stored memory representations, eliciting matching signals. As first established by psychology experiments in the 1970s, recognition memory for pictures is quite remarkable: humans can remember thousands of images at high accuracy after seeing each only once and only for a few seconds.
Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human's cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.
In psychology, mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future. The term was coined by Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, building on Endel Tulving's work on episodic memory.
Arthur Paul Shimamura was a professor of psychology and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focused on the neural basis of human memory and cognition. He received his BA in experimental psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977 and his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Larry Squire, where he studied amnesic patients. In 1989, Shimamura began his professorship at UC Berkeley. He has published over 100 scientific articles and chapters, was a founding member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and has been science advisor for the San Francisco Exploratorium science museum.
Neil Burgess is a British neuroscientist. He has been a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London since 2004 and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow since 2011. He has made important contributions to understanding memory and spatial cognition by developing computational models relating behaviour to activity in biological neural networks.
Elizabeth A. Buffalo is the Wayne E. Crill Endowed Professor and Chair of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and chief of the neuroscience division at the Washington National Primate Research Center. She is known for her research in the field of neurophysiology pertaining to the role of the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe structures in learning and memory and in spatial representation and navigation.
Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.
Kathryn Emma Watkins is an experimental psychologist in the Wellcome Trust centre for integrative neuroimaging at the University of Oxford and a tutorial fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. Her research investigates the brain processes that underlie speech, language and development.
Catherine J. "Cathy" Price is a British neuroscientist and academic. She is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.