In studies of human episodic memory, the phenomenon of reactivation has traditionally been observed in regions of occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) involved in visual perception. However, reactivation also occurs in lateral parietal cortex (LPC), and recent evidence suggests that stimulus-specific reactivation may be stronger in LPC than in OTC. These observations raise important questions about the nature of memory representations in LPC and their relationship to representations in OTC. Here, we report two fMRI experiments that quantified stimulus feature information (color and object category) within LPC and OTC, separately during perception and memory retrieval, in male and female human subjects. Across both experiments, we observed a clear dissociation between OTC and LPC: while feature information in OTC was relatively stronger during perception than memory, feature information in LPC was relatively stronger during memory than perception. Thus, while OTC and LPC represented common stimulus features in our experiments, they preferentially represented this information during different stages. In LPC, this bias toward mnemonic information co-occurred with stimulus-level reinstatement during memory retrieval. In Experiment 2, we considered whether mnemonic feature information in LPC was flexibly and dynamically shaped by top-down retrieval goals. Indeed, we found that dorsal LPC preferentially represented retrieved feature information that addressed the current goal. In contrast, ventral LPC represented retrieved features independent of the current goal. Collectively, these findings provide insight into the nature and significance of mnemonic representations in LPC and constitute an important bridge between putative mnemonic and control functions of parietal cortex. When humans remember an event from the past, patterns of sensory activity that were present during the initial event are thought to be reactivated. Here, we investigated the role of lateral parietal cortex (LPC), a high-level region of association cortex, in representing prior visual experiences. We find that LPC contained stronger information about stimulus features during memory retrieval than during perception. We also found that current task goals influenced the strength of stimulus feature information in LPC during memory. These findings suggest that, in addition to early sensory areas, high-level areas of cortex, such as LPC, represent visual information during memory retrieval, and that these areas may play a special role in flexibly aligning memories with current goals.

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In studies of human episodic memory, the phenomenon of reactivation has traditionally been observed in regions of occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) involved in sensory experience. However, reactivation also occurs in lateral parietal cortex (LPC), and recent evidence indicates that reactivation of stimulus-specific information may be stronger in LPC than in OTC. These observations raise a number of questions about the nature of memory representations in LPC and their relation to representations in OTC. Here, we report two fMRI experiments that quantify stimulus feature information (color and object category) within LPC and OTC, separately during perception and memory retrieval, in male and female human subjects. Across both experiments, we show a clear dissociation between OTC and LPC: while feature information in OTC is relatively stronger during perception than memory, feature information in LPC is relatively stronger during memory than perception. Thus, while OTC and LPC represent common stimulus features, they preferentially represent this information during different stages. We show that this transformation of feature information across regions co-occurs with stimulus-level reinstatement within LPC and high-level OTC. In Experiment 2, we consider whether feature information in LPC during memory retrieval is flexibly and dynamically shaped by top-down goals. Indeed, we find that dorsal LPC preferentially represents retrieved feature information that addresses current goals. In contrast, ventral LPC represents retrieved features independent of current goals.Collectively, these findings provide insight into the nature and significance of mnemonic representations in LPC and constitute an important bridge between putative mnemonic and control functions of parietal cortex.Traditional models of episodic memory posit that sensory activity evoked during perception is reactivated during recollection (Kosslyn, 1980;Damasio, 1989). There is considerable evidence for such reactivation in visual regions of occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) (Wheeler et al., 2000;Polyn et al., 2005). However, recent human neuroimaging work indicates that stimulus information is also reactivated in lateral parietal cortex (LPC) (Kuhl and Chun, 2014;Chen et al., 2016;Lee and Kuhl, 2016;Xiao et al., 2017). While these findings accord with evidence for univariate increases in LPC BOLD activity during successful remembering (Wagner et al., 2005;Kuhl and Chun, 2014), they also raise important questions about whether and how representations of retrieved memories differ between LPC and OTC.Univariate fMRI studies have consistently found that, in contrast to sensory regions, ventral LPC exhibits low activation when perceptual events are experienced but high activation when these events are successfully retrieved (Daselaar, 2009;Kim et al., 2010). The idea that LPC is relatively more involved in memory retrieval than perception has also received support from recent pattern-based fMRI studies. Long, Lee, and Kuhl (2016) found that reactivation of previously l...

Neuroimaging studies of human memory have consistently found that univariate responses in parietal cortex track episodic experience with stimuli (whether stimuli are "old" or "new"). More recently, pattern-based fMRI studies have shown that parietal cortex also carries information about the semantic content of remembered experiences. However, it is not well understood how memory-based and content-based signals are integrated within parietal cortex. Here, we used voxel-wise encoding models and a recognition memory task to predict the fMRI activity patterns evoked by complex natural scene images based on (a) the episodic history and (b) the semantic content of each image. Models were generated and compared across distinct subregions of parietal cortex and for occipitotemporal cortex. We show that parietal and occipitotemporal regions each encode memory and content information, but they differ in how they combine this information. Among parietal subregions, angular gyrus was characterized by robust and overlapping effects of memory and content. Moreover, subject-specific semantic tuning functions revealed that successful recognition shifted the amplitude of tuning functions in angular gyrus but did not change the selectivity of tuning. In other words, effects of memory and content were additive in angular gyrus. This pattern of data contrasted with occipitotemporal cortex where memory and content effects were interactive: memory effects were preferentially expressed by voxels tuned to the content of a remembered image. Collectively, these findings provide unique insight into how parietal cortex combines information about episodic memory and semantic content.

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