# Neural dynamics supporting integration and recall over long timescales during natural continuous input

> **NIH NIH R01** · PRINCETON UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $499,276

## Abstract

Project Summary
Present and prior information converge often in everyday life. For example, during language comprehension,
each syllable achieves its meaning in the context of a word, and each word in the context of a sentence.
Despite the clear importance of such integration of past and present, most studies of memory use simple
stimuli that are isolated in time. The long-term goal of this laboratory is to understand how the brain uses past
information, gathered over seconds to hours, to make sense of a stream of incoming information. Previous
work from the laboratory shows that many areas of cortex can accumulate information over time and use it for
online processing. Furthermore, this research showed that early sensory areas use past information gathered
over milliseconds, and this timescale increases to minutes in higher-order brain areas. These findings suggest
that memories needed for online stimulus processing are topographically distributed in a hierarchy across the
cortex based on their temporal properties. The overall objective of this application is to investigate the
functional role of cortical areas at the top of the processing hierarchy; in particular, we will investigate to what
extent these cortical areas have an intrinsic ability to accumulate information over minutes, and to what extent
these long-timescale properties emerge from interactions with the hippocampus. This contribution is significant
because the proposed research will provide new insights into a central function of the brain: the ability to
accumulate information over minutes and use it to process an incoming information stream. This approach is
innovative because it uses new experimental paradigms, both fMRI and ECoG methods, both neurotypical and
brain lesioned amnesic patients, and includes development of novel analysis methods for brain responses to
complex natural stimuli (stories and movies). The work proposed in this application will advance knowledge of
how the brain combines information across minutes and will produce new approaches to the study of how
memory is dynamically used during online stimulus processing.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9829580
- **Project number:** 5R01MH112357-04
- **Recipient organization:** PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Uri Hasson
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $499,276
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-02-15 → 2021-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9829580

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9829580, Neural dynamics supporting integration and recall over long timescales during natural continuous input (5R01MH112357-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9829580. Licensed CC0.

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