Research summary
Perspective plays a central role in shaping our memory by influencing how we see the past. Impairments in our memory’s perspective contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder, which affects almost 10 per cent of Canadians.
Dr. Peggy St. Jacques, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory, is using state-of-the-art immersive virtual reality technologies and neuroimaging to understand how the brain forms memories from multiple visual perspectives. She and her research team hope their findings will help to resolve debates about the origin of alternative perspectives in memories and offer a new way to understand how the flexibility of virtual reality perspective affects our memories.