Matthew Dennis Grilli

Assistant Professor, Psychology

Assistant Professor, Evelyn F Mcknight Brain Institute

Assistant Professor, Neurology

Assistant Professor, Cognitive Science - GIDP

Assistant Professor, BIO5 Institute

Primary Department

Psychology

Department Affiliations

Psychology

BIO5 Institute

Contact

(520) 621-7447

mdgrilli@arizona.edu

Work Summary

My research interests are broadly focused on understanding how and why we store and retrieve memories. The clinical and cognitive neuroscience research conducted in my laboratory combines neuropsychological, cognitive, social psychological, and neuroimaging approaches. An emphasis of my current research is autobiographical memory, which refers to memories of personal experiences. Ongoing projects are investigating how autobiographical memory is affected in several populations, including older adults at risk for Alzheimer’s disease and individuals with acquired brain injury. We also are interested in understanding how changes to autobiographical memory impact other aspects of cognition, and we seek to develop new interventions to improve autobiographical memory and everyday functioning.

Research Interest

My research interests are broadly focused on understanding the reciprocal relations of self and memory. How does the self influence learning and memory retrieval? How does memory contribute to one's sense of self? Uncovering the ways in which the self and memory interact may advance understanding of identity, elucidate the conditions and experiences that modify the self, and inspire clinical interventions that improve quality of life and wellbeing for people who have neurological or mental health conditions. Ongoing projects are investigating how to improve memory through self-referential encoding strategies in individuals with traumatic brain injury and other neuropsychological conditions. My current research also is investigating how individuals with amnesia (a profound learning and memory impairment) construct a sense of self and experience a sense of continuity in life.

Publications

The association of personal semantic memory to identity representations: insight into higher-order networks of autobiographical contents

Grilli, M. D. (2017). The association of personal semantic memory to identity representations: insight into higher-order networks of autobiographical contents. Memory (Hove, England), 25(10), 1435-1443.

Identity representations are higher-order knowledge structures that organise autobiographical memories on the basis of personality and role-based themes of one's self-concept. In two experiments, the extent to which different types of personal semantic content are reflected in these higher-order networks of memories was investigated. Healthy, young adult participants generated identity representations that varied in remoteness of formation and verbally reflected on these themes in an open-ended narrative task. The narrative responses were scored for retrieval of episodic, experience-near personal semantic and experience-far (i.e., abstract) personal semantic contents. Results revealed that to reflect on remotely formed identity representations, experience-far personal semantic contents were retrieved more than experience-near personal semantic contents. In contrast, to reflect on recently formed identity representations, experience-near personal semantic contents were retrieved more than experience-far personal semantic contents. Although episodic memory contents were retrieved less than both personal semantic content types to reflect on remotely formed identity representations, this content type was retrieved at a similar frequency as experience-far personal semantic content to reflect on recently formed identity representations. These findings indicate that the association of personal semantic content to identity representations is robust and related to time since acquisition of these knowledge structures.

The Life Stories of Adults with Amnesia: Insights into the Contribution of the MTL to the Higher-Order Organization of Autobiographical Memory

Grilli, M. D., Wank, A. A., & Verfaellie, M. (2017). The Life Stories of Adults with Amnesia: Insights into the Contribution of the MTL to the Higher-Order Organization of Autobiographical Memory. Neuropsychologia.

Autobiographical memories are not stored in isolation but rather are organized into life chapters, higher-order knowledge structures that represent major themes conveying the arc of one's life. Neuropsychological studies have revealed that both episodic memory and some aspects of personal semantic memory are impaired in adults with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage. However, whether such impairment compromises the retrieval and formation of life chapters is unknown. Therefore, we had 10 adults with MTL amnesia and 20 control participants narrate their life stories, and we extracted life chapters from these narratives using a novel scoring protocol. For the retrograde and anterograde time period separately, we evaluated the number of life chapters and assessed their quality, as indexed by measures of complexity and richness. Additionally, to investigate the idea that formation of life chapters occurs on a protracted time scale, we separated the amnesic participants into an early-life and a later-life onset subgroup. Results revealed that early-onset, but not later-onset, amnesic participants generated fewer retrograde life chapters than controls. The higher-order temporal relation among retrograde chapters, but not their thematic relation or the richness of individual life chapters, was impaired in both amnesic subgroups. The amnesic participants also generated fewer anterograde life chapters than controls, and the richness of their anterograde chapters was reduced in terms of content, but not self-reflection. Findings suggest that the organization of autobiographical content into life chapters is a protracted process that depends on the MTL, as does retrieval of higher order temporal relations among life chapters.

Matthew Dennis Grilli