The Neural Mechanisms Of Autobiographical Memory By Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation(TMS)

Autobiographical memory is a personal memory of life events, and some of the baseline (figure, location, time, self, emotional, etc) of the summary record. In recent years, autobiographical memory study not only remain in the behavior research, neuropsychological and brain imaging studies have also made tremendous progress, We know more about the essence of autobiographical.Generally considered self, time and emotional is the three important factors of autobiographical memory. The neural mechanisms of Autobiographical memory on the self ,emotional and time factors have a lot of controversies. The most research have found that self-factors have relations with the right hemisphere, and very few researchs have found that the left hemisphere activation. A lot of researchers wanted to explore tne neural mechanisms of emotions by fMRL, ERP, CT and so on, but for a variety of reasons, there are different results, some research shows that negative sentiments in the right hemisphere, positive emotions have a wide range of the entire brain activation; Other researchs shows that negative feelings is located in the left hemisphere. The neural mechanisms of the time factor exist two controversies:On the one hand ,semantic memory, through the consolidation of memory, autobiographical memory is gradually independent of the medial temporal lobe; On the other hand,utobiographical memory disobeys in the consolidation of memories, and as time-dependent changes in the medial temporal lobe.This research collected detailed autobiographical memory material by extractiing clues or free recall,and then these materials were organized into more in line with the characteristics of autobiographical memory sentence.To compare autobiographical memory,this research increased others, public events as the experimental control group.In order to prevent scattering attention .On the basis of behavior experiments, this research used transcranial magnetic stimulation(TMS) to inhibit the function activities of prefrontal regional, and observed behaviour change. There are three variables in behavior experiments:the type of sentence (self, others, public events), emotional (positive / negative) and time (recent events / remote events).Besides the three variables, TMS experiment also an increase of two variables :stimulate position (left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), and whether stimulation (TMS with NO TMS).The experimental results show that: autobiographical memory has obvious self-reference effect; Compared to non-autobiographical and more public events,autobiographical memory have more activities in the right prefrontal cortex.It means the right prefrontal cortex and autobiographical memory have a causal relationship.The prefrontal cortex plays plays an important role in emotional memory of autobiographical memory and non-autobiographical memory. The positive events of autobiographical memory are connected with the right prefrontal cortex . For the negative events of non-autobiographical memory, right and left prefrontal cortex play an important role.