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Poster B139 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
More than meets the eye: Reconstructing lingering thoughts from visual long-term memories
Futing Zou1, J. Benjamin Hutchinson1, Brice A. Kuhl1; 1University of Oregon
Leading theories of memory propose that our experiences are embedded within slowly drifting representations that capture the passage of time (temporal context). When events from the past are remembered, temporal context representations are thought to also be reinstated. Here, using natural language processing methods and inverted fMRI encoding models, we developed a novel approach to directly measure the reinstatement of temporal context. Specifically, we show that when a previously-encountered stimulus is re-encountered, activity patterns in ventromedial prefrontal cortex reflect the semantic information that immediately preceded its original encounter. That is, re-encountering a stimulus reinstates semantic information that putatively ‘lingered in mind’ when the stimulus was originally encountered. This constitutes novel evidence of temporal context reinstatement and highlights the influence of past events on ongoing processing.
Keywords: temporal context reinstatement inverted encoding model semantic content episodic memory