The University of Arizona is part of a consortium of institutions that recently received new federal funding to continue its research into the complex relationship between memory and forgetting.

According to a press release from UA News, the consortium -- part of the National Institutes of Health's BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Technologies) Initiative -- will receive $20 million in funding over the next two years from the National Institute of Mental Health.

"Every day presents us with enormous amounts of information, and our memory is critical for us to make sense of the world," said UA psychology Professor and cognitive scientist Gabriel Kreiman, the UA team leader, in the press release.

"Unfortunately, memory is imperfect. Sometimes, we may have trouble recalling names, or we may misremember details, and the memories we do maintain can subtly shift over time."

Kreiman and his collaborators will focus primarily on how memory distortions arise in the brain and can shape our perception of events and, potentially, our behavior.

"We are focusing on memory errors and how they change behavior in an effort to better understand the basic operations that support long-term memories and how they can go wrong," Kreiman said in the press release.

The consortium's work is expected to have important implications for fields such as psychology, mental health, aging, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's.

"This project is a great opportunity to explore complex human cognition with high-level technologies and a multi-disciplinary approach," said Kreiman.

"The collaborative nature of this work is inspiring and creates an environment where we can ask more comprehensive scientific questions than would be possible if each of us worked independently."