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Published April 25, 2018 | Published
Journal Article Open

Human episodic memory retrieval is accompanied by a neural contiguity effect

Abstract

Cognitive psychologists have long hypothesized that experiences are encoded in a temporal context that changes gradually over time. When an episodic memory is retrieved, the state of context is recovered—a jump back in time. We recorded from single units in the MTL of epilepsy patients performing an item recognition task. The population vector changed gradually over minutes during presentation of the list. When a probe from the list was remembered with high confidence, the population vector reinstated the temporal context of the original presentation of that probe during study—a neural contiguity effect that provides a possible mechanism for behavioral contiguity effects. This pattern was only observed for well-remembered probes; old probes that were not well-remembered showed an anti-contiguity effect. These results constitute the first direct evidence that recovery of an episodic memory in humans is associated with retrieval of a gradually-changing state of temporal context—a neural "jump-back-in-time" that parallels the act of remembering.

Additional Information

© 2018 the authors. Beginning six months after publication the Work will be made freely available to the public on SfN's website to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Received: 15 August 2017; Revised: 4 March 2018; Accepted: 12 March 2018; Published: 3 April 2018. The authors acknowledge helpful discussions with Nigel Stoddard, Inder Singh, Zoran Tiganj, Amy Criss, and Rosie Cowell. This work was supported by NIH (R01EB022864 and R01MH112169 to M.W.H. and R01MH110831 and U01NS103792 to U.R.), the National Science Foundation (CAREER Award BCS-1554105 to U.R.), and a Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award from the McKnight Foundation for Neuroscience (to U.R.). Author contributions: S.F., U.R., and M.W.H. designed research; S.F., U.R., and M.W.H. performed research; S.F., U.R., and M.W.H. analyzed data; S.F., U.R., and M.W.H. wrote the paper. The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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August 21, 2023
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