InformationSeekingMesolimbicEngagementStudy1

The Influence of Mesolimbic-hippocampal Interactions on Episodic Memory During Active Information Seeking

Study 1 will use a novel Game Show task, in which the investigators manipulate participant's agency to control their learning environment to specify unguided exploration.

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Motivation
• Intervention / Treatment: Behavioral: Task Instructions

Detailed Description

Study 1 will use a novel Game Show task, in which the investigators manipulate participant's agency to control their learning environment to specify unguided exploration. In the encoding session, participants play the producer for a game show. On each trial, participants are shown a trial-unique contestant (2s), and then they select one of 3 presented doors to reveal a hidden object (4 seconds). The selected door is then highlighted (2-4s), which is then removed to show a trial-unique object image, which is framed as a prize (2s). On exploration trials, participants actively select which door to open. On control trials, the participant is forced to select a highlighted door, fostering passive rather than active information seeking. Unbeknownst to participants, there is no relationship between selected doors and revealed objects, as objects are pre-selected for each trial. Thus, timing, motor demands, and visual information are fixed across conditions. Participants will complete 3 runs of both the exploration and control condition, with each run containing 20 trials. Temporal jitters are placed between cues and outcomes and between trials, as determined by design optimization software77. Run will be pseudo-randomized across participants so no more than 2 runs of the same condition will appear in a row. Following encoding, participants will complete immediate and delayed item-associative memory test. On each trial of the memory test, participants will view the characters presented during exploration and control trials as well as new foil characters. If a participant indicates that they have previously seen a character before, the participants will be shown three object images encountered during encoding, and decide which item served as a prize for that specific character. In this way, the investigators can resolve memory for contestants (i.e., cues), and associative binding across contestants and prizes (i.e., cue-outcome). Participants memory will be tested for half the stimuli immediately and at a 24-hour delay.

• Study Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Actual): 76
• Phase: Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• United States
  • Pennsylvania
    • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, 19122
      • Temple University

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: Adult
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

• 20/40 far acuity (either corrected or uncorrected)
• In good medical health

Exclusion Criteria:

• History of head injury
• History of illness with Central Nervous Systems implications
• On Medications that Affect blood flow response and alertness
• Consumption of smoking and/or coffee 30 minutes prior to laboratory testing
• Placement of a device contraindicated for magnetic resonance imaging including cardia pacemaker, aneurysm clip, cochlear implants, pregnancy, intra-uterine device, shrapnel, metal fragments in the eyes, neurostimulators
• Weight > 250lbs
• Claustrophobia

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Basic Science
• Allocation: N/A
• Interventional Model: Single Group Assignment
• Masking: None (Open Label)

Number of Arms

1

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm	Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Motivation; Trials in which participants are motivated by agency or not in a within-subjects design	Behavioral: Task Instructions; Participants will be given cued instructions as to whether they are in a high or low motivation condition

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Mesolimbic-hippocampal Interactions	Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Activation characterizing mesolimbic-hippocampal interactions as queried using representational simliarity analysis across these two regions of interest. In this analysis, we explore the pattern similarity within the same set of regions (mesolimbic and hippocampal regions) across different trial types. In this way the standard unit for these values reflect a correlation that is summarized by a standardized beta-value extracted from a nested mixed effects model.	During Procedure
Episodic Memory	Item and Associative memory for memoranda shown during the task. This measure reflects the percent of memory test retrieval trials in which participants were able to successfull remember an item and its associated features compared across a high and low reward condition.	24-hours, we administered our memory test 24 hours after the first session but this is the first time we are administering this test.

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: Temple University
• Collaborators: National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Actual): October 25, 2023
• Primary Completion (Actual): February 9, 2024
• Study Completion (Actual): February 9, 2024

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: January 31, 2024
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: February 12, 2024
• First Posted (Actual): February 14, 2024

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): April 23, 2026
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: April 1, 2026
• Last Verified: April 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Other Study ID Numbers: R01DA055259-1; R01DA055259-03 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: YES
• IPD Plan Description: Deidentified data will be shared on the open science framework.
• IPD Sharing Time Frame: Data will be shared within 1 year of study completion, and it will be available for at least 10 years.
• IPD Sharing Supporting Information Type: ANALYTIC_CODE

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No