Contextual Associations During Episodic Recall of Everyday or Virtual Reality

Not Applicable

Completed

• Conditions: Healthy Volunteers
• Interventions: Other: Functional brain imaging without any contrast agent

• Registration Number: NCT03286387
• Lead Sponsor: Hospices Civils de Lyon

Brief Summary

The project is dedicated to development of new paradigms to investigate memory and attention in the rich and realistic environments. The investigator will use modern interactive digital technologies for encoding complex episodes either using mobile phone technology in everyday life or using a virtual reality life-like simulation.

He aims to characterize the role of the medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex during recall of naturalistic episodic experiences, using functional neuroimaging (fMRI) in healthy participants. The secondary aim is assess how the allocation of attention during memory encoding contribute to mechanisms of the subsequent recall. He will achieve this by monitoring gaze direction during encoding and by analyzing the retrieval data as a function of the elements that participants attended / fixated during encoding.

The protocol will involve, first, behavioral testing of memory performance with encoding in the real-life or in virtual reality, followed by the main hypothesis testing phase when fMRI will be used to measure brain activity during retrieval.

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Study First Submitted: 2017-09-14
• Study First Submitted QC: 2017-09-14
• Study First Posted: 2017-09-18
• Study Start: 2018-10-11
• Primary Completion: 2019-08-13
• Study Completion: 2019-08-13
• Status Verified: 2023-07
• Last Update Submitted: 2023-07-07
• Last Update Posted: 2023-07-10

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: COMPLETED
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 95

Inclusion Criteria

• Possession a Smartphone compatible with GPS 3-rd generation and exploitation system Android 4.2 with user-activated geolocation (for mobile phone studies).
• Able to navigate in virtual reality with a help of the keyboard (for virtual reality studies).
• Not using glasses.
• All subjects will give their written consent for participation in the study.
• They will be right-handed
• They will have French social coverage.

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Exclusion Criteria

• Previous neurologic or psychiatric disease.
• Cognitive deficits restricting understanding of the tasks.
• Pregnant or breath-feeding women.
• Persons under guardianship, curatorship or any other administrative or judicial measure of deprivation of rights or liberty.
• Subjects currently participating in other study.

Additional exclusion criteria for an fMRI recording

• Neurologic, cardiac electrostimulation or defibrillator.
• Cardiac prostheses
• Intracranial clips or clamps
• Cerebrospinal fluid disorders
• Metal particles in the eyes
• Metal dental or articular prostheses
• Diffusion pomp or other infusion system
• Claustrophobia
• Head tattoo , makeup, hair gel

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Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: SINGLE_GROUP

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
Memory for naturalistic episodes	Functional brain imaging without any contrast agent	Encoding of episode in real life situations (using Smartphones) or in a virtual environment, followed by memory retrieval (either behavior only or with fMRI, in successive studies)

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
BOLD cerebral response to contextual recall in medial temporal lobe	up to 1 week after the end of the encoding session	After spatial preprocessing of individual series of EPI fMRI images, normalization and smoothing as suggested for SPM analysis, the successful and failed contextual recall will be modeled and convolved with canonical HRF function. The GLM will be estimated according to the algorithm of SPM, the significance threshold will be p\<0.05 FWE within the regions of interest. Our hypothesis will be confirmed by activation of medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex in contextual recall, congruent contextual cueing and recall of episodes when targets were semantically congruent with the context at encoding.
BOLD cerebral response to contextual recall in prefrontal cortex	up to 1 week after the end of the encoding session	After spatial preprocessing of individual series of EPI fMRI images, normalization and smoothing as suggested for Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) analysis, the successful and failed contextual recall will be modeled and convolved with canonical HRF function. The GLM will be estimated according to the algorithm of SPM, the significance threshold will be p\<0.05 Family-wise error (FWE) within the regions of interest. Our hypothesis will be confirmed by activation of medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex in contextual recall, congruent contextual cueing and recall of episodes when targets were semantically congruent with the context at encoding.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Pattern of gaze fixation during episodic encoding and cerebral activity during recall	up to 1 week after the end of the encoding session	The gaze direction during both during episodic encoding and recall. We will estimate a correlation between the activation of medial temporal lobe/ prefrontal cortex and the similarity of the gaze fixations during encoding and retrieval. A positive correlation will support our hypothesis about the link between attention and contextual encoding.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

U1028 INSERM - CNRS UMR 5292 Equipe ImpAct; 🇫🇷 Bron, France