Ms. Decker will test the hypothesis that myelin damage impairs episodic memory by disrupting neural communication between two memory relevant brain regions, namely, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Accordingly, she will examine neural synchrony, (a measure of neural communication), during an associative encoding and retrieval task in pediatric brain tumor survivors (PBTS) and age-matched healthy controls. In healthy samples, similar memory tasks elicit neural synchrony between the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, making this an excellent task for my investigation. Further, PBTS are an excellent population for this study, as they incur myelin damage and impaired memory due to brain cancer treatments.
