Contextual Associations During Episodic Recall of Everyday or Virtual Reality (BREAL)

Civil Hospices of Lyon

Status: Completed

Conditions: Healthy Volunteers

Treatments: Other: Functional brain imaging without any contrast agent

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03286387

2017-A02558-45 (Other Identifier)

69HCL17_0404

Details and patient eligibility

About

The project is dedicated to development of new paradigms to investigate memory and attention in the rich and realistic environments. The investigator will use modern interactive digital technologies for encoding complex episodes either using mobile phone technology in everyday life or using a virtual reality life-like simulation.

He aims to characterize the role of the medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex during recall of naturalistic episodic experiences, using functional neuroimaging (fMRI) in healthy participants. The secondary aim is assess how the allocation of attention during memory encoding contribute to mechanisms of the subsequent recall. He will achieve this by monitoring gaze direction during encoding and by analyzing the retrieval data as a function of the elements that participants attended / fixated during encoding.

The protocol will involve, first, behavioral testing of memory performance with encoding in the real-life or in virtual reality, followed by the main hypothesis testing phase when fMRI will be used to measure brain activity during retrieval.

Enrollment: 95 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 40 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Possession a Smartphone compatible with GPS 3-rd generation and exploitation system Android 4.2 with user-activated geolocation (for mobile phone studies).
• Able to navigate in virtual reality with a help of the keyboard (for virtual reality studies).
• Not using glasses.
• All subjects will give their written consent for participation in the study.
• They will be right-handed
• They will have French social coverage.

Exclusion criteria

• Previous neurologic or psychiatric disease.
• Cognitive deficits restricting understanding of the tasks.
• Pregnant or breath-feeding women.
• Persons under guardianship, curatorship or any other administrative or judicial measure of deprivation of rights or liberty.
• Subjects currently participating in other study.

Additional exclusion criteria for an fMRI recording

• Neurologic, cardiac electrostimulation or defibrillator.
• Cardiac prostheses
• Intracranial clips or clamps
• Cerebrospinal fluid disorders
• Metal particles in the eyes
• Metal dental or articular prostheses
• Diffusion pomp or other infusion system
• Claustrophobia
• Head tattoo , makeup, hair gel

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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95 participants in 1 patient group

Memory for naturalistic episodes

Experimental group

Description:

Encoding of episode in real life situations (using Smartphones) or in a virtual environment, followed by memory retrieval (either behavior only or with fMRI, in successive studies)

Treatment:

Other: Functional brain imaging without any contrast agent