Dr Maria Wimber has been awarded a £415,000 grant to investigate the processes that underlie how we retrieve memories.

Maria Wimber

Maria will explore the role that active remembering plays in protecting memories against forgetting, and how repeated recall transforms memories over time.

Many everyday events leave a trace in our memory, making it easy to remember what movie we saw, or what we had for dinner yesterday or even a week ago.

But one year later most memories will have faded. Why do some experiences become stable memories while others are forgotten?

The grant, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and titled Retrieval as a Fast Route to Memory Consolidation, will give Maria three years of funding to pursue her research, together with a postdoc.

Maria will use a combination of behavioural memory tests and state-of-the-art pattern analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data to track individual memory traces in the brain.