The world was a different place when Baycrest’s Rotman Research  Institute (RRI) was born in 1989. Scientists were slowly uncovering the connections between aging and memory loss and between the brain and behaviour. Predictions about the effects of Canada’s approaching “grey tsunami” were just emerging.

During those early years, the foundations of the Institute were laid by an extraordinary cadre of scientists: Dr. Fergus Craik, Dr. Morris Moscovitch, Dr. Donald Stuss, Dr. Endel Tulving and Dr. Gordon Winocur. Their seminal research into cognitive functioning and their exceptional leadership skills would launch the fledgling Institute into prominence over the next two decades.

Before long, their success began attracting to the RRI the best and the brightest young researchers from across Canada and around the world. Eventually, these young scientists would build on this foundation and begin striking out in new directions of their own.

In 2010 Dr. Craik – now a senior scientist at the RRI and professor emeritus of Psychology at the University of Toronto – continued studying various aspects of human memory and attention and how they change over time.

“I take the view that memory processes are activities of the mind and brain as opposed to structural 'things in the head',” Dr. Craik explains. “In this view, the processes of acquiring information ('encoding') and using or re-experiencing that information later ('retrieving') are mental and neural activities, much as is the case with perceiving and thinking.”

Over the past three decades, he has conducted experimental studies to illustrate and confirm this point of view. “We have shown for example that memory performance can vary as much as 400 percent (a fourfold increase) depending simply on the type of processing that is carried out at the time of initial acquisition,” he says.

Another focus of Dr. Craik’s work is how memory changes with aging. He has found that while age-related memory problems are real, the degree of impairment varies depending on how memory is tested.

“The ability to recall events and facts with few aids and out of context is typically poor in older adults, whereas the ability to recognize verbal or pictorial material can be virtually at the level of a younger person,” he explains.

Today, he and Dr. Bradley Buchsbaum are using the RRI’s functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) equipment to study which parts of the brain are most involved in associative memory – for example, the ability to recall a name when one sees a face. This type of memory tends to get worse with age.

“We’re hooking people up to the fMRI equipment and showing them vivid videos containing lots of complex information,” explains Dr. Buchsbaum, who studied at the University of California and worked at the U.S. National Institutes of Health before joining Baycrest’s scientific staff.

“With this equipment we can observe what’s actually happening in people’s brains as information is encoded,” he adds. “Later, we ask them to recall scenes from each video while creating real-time images of their brain function.”

Such research may one day yield new ideas about how to delay or even prevent memory impairment caused by normal aging and by disease.

As one of the RRI’s founding scientists, Dr. Craik says that he especially enjoys working with up-and-coming young cognitive researchers like Dr. Buchsbaum, who is now in his second year at RRI.

As for Dr. Buchsbaum, he says he never thought he’d have the chance to work so closely with scientists whose names loom so large in the field. “The research environment here offers an embarrassment of riches,” he says. “For a cogni¬tive neuroscientist, the Rotman Research Institute is definitely a very good place to be.”