The National Science Foundation awarded $500,000 under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075) to the University of California, San Francisco for a project grant titled "Understanding Mechanisms of Semantic Memory through Intracranial Recording and Stimulation." The three-year project, running from September 1, 2022 to August 31, 2025, will utilize intracranial electroencephalography recordings from awake epilepsy patients to decipher how neural populations in key brain regions process semantic information. Researchers will measure population responses across distributed semantic and memory circuits to semantic memory tasks involving both verbal and non-verbal information. Machine learning techniques will be applied to understand how information flows between regions. The project will also directly test whether electrical stimulation of brain tissue during cognitive tasks results in predictable effects, revealing causal roles in semantic processing. It aims to yield new insights into the neural encoding and circuit-level support of semantic knowledge retrieval, with potential long-term implications for therapies to address memory loss.
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