1. Coding of Event Nodes and Narrative Context in the Hippocampus.
- Author
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Milivojevic, Branka, Varadinov, Meryl, Grabovetsky, Alejandro Vicente, Collin, Silvy H. P., and Doeller, Christian F.
- Subjects
HIPPOCAMPUS (Brain) ,PHYSIOLOGICAL aspects of memory ,NARRATIVES ,NEUROSCIENCES ,MAGNETIC resonance imaging - Abstract
Narratives may provide a general context, unrestricted by space and time, which can be used to organize episodic memories into networks of related events. However, it is not clear how narrative contexts are represented in the brain. Here we test the novel hypothesis that the formation of narrative-based contextual representations in humans relies on the same hippocampal mechanisms that enable formation of spatiotemporal contexts in rodents. Participants watched a movie consisting of two interleaved narratives while we monitored their brain activity using fMRI. We used representational similarity analysis, a type of multivariate pattern analysis, which uses across-voxel correlations as a proxy for neural-pattern similarity, to examine whether the patterns of neural activity can be used to differentiate between narratives and recurring narrative elements, such as people and locations. We demonstrate that the neural activity patterns in the hippocampus differentiate between event nodes (people and locations) and narratives (different stories) and that these narrativecontext representations diverge gradually over time akin to remapping-induced spatial maps represented by rodent place cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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