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Poster C48 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Representational Overlap Triggers Reorganization of Memories
Anisha Babu1 (), Zhifang Ye1, Brice Kuhl1; 1University of Oregon
Remembering events from the past requires discriminating between similar memories. Theoretical and empirical work argues that when neural representations of memories overlap, this triggers adaptive changes that improve discriminability. Here, we tested this idea using (1) fMRI to measure initial representational overlap among memories for naturalistic scene images and (2) Natural Language Processing algorithms to quantify the structure of verbal recall. Across six runs of fMRI scanning, N=21 participants learned to discriminate 18 scene images (three categories * six similar exemplars). After scanning, participants verbally recalled each scene. Within the parahippocampal place area (PPA), we assessed the representational structure of the 18 images and the relationship of this structure to verbal recall. We found that PPA robustly reflected category-level information, which was preserved in verbal recall. Within categories, however, PPA representational structure of individual exemplars was negatively correlated with the structure of verbal recall. These results suggest that neural overlap triggered an adaptive reorganization that improved discriminability of recalled memories.
Keywords: fMRI memory Natural Language Processing naturalistic images