Collective memory shapes the organization of individual memories in the medial prefrontal cortex

Abstract

Fig. 3 | Model dependencies and results of the rSA. a, MDS of the RDMs describing the relationships between pictures in terms of their collective (national news bulletins and reports on World War II), semantic (that is, Wikipedia World War II articles), spatial (that is, Memorial layout) and temporal (that is, acquisition order) properties. Collective and semantic RDMs included six to ten selected topics (Fig. 2c) and their ten iterations. Temporal RDMs included the six possible routes around the Memorial. b, The dmPFC and vmPFC regions of interest (ROIs). c, Similarities between the upper triangular portions of image arrangements (left), dmPFC (middle) and vmPFC (right) RDMs, and collective, semantic and contextual model RDMs. Bar graphs display the mean beta coefficients from the regression model (top) and Spearman's correlation coefficients (bottom) across participants (N = 24). Horizontal lines indicate significant differences at P < 0.05, false discovery rate (FDR)-corrected for multiple comparisons. Error bars reflect 95% bootstrapped CIs (and thus indicate significance when they do not overlap with zero). Dashed horizontal lines indicate the noise ceiling (that is, an estimate of the reliability of the neural data; see Methods), which reflects the expected performance of the (unknown) true model given the noise and variability among study participants 34. Regarding brain imaging data, the collective RDM reaches the noise ceiling, indicating that collective schemas account for a significant amount of the true neural dissimilarity structure. Note that in the context of the current experiment, the small correlation between individuals' brain dissimilarity structures and the expected true model arises from the fact that we have only one measurement of each pattern of memory activity (that is, participants recall the picture only once), making the estimate of the neural dissimilarity noisy.

Memória Ou Metamemória Das Origens?

“…Essa é uma questão difícil, pois envolve documentar o compartilhamento de estados mentais, freqüentemente considerados incomunicáveis (NAGEL, 1974). Trabalhos recentes (ABEL et al, 2019;CANDIA et al, 2019;CHEN et al, 2017;GAGNEPAIN et al, 2019;HIRST et al, 2018;O'CONNOR, 2019;ROEDIGER et al, 2019;SPIVAK et al, 2019) permitiram alguns progressos nesta área. A leitura muito útil desses trabalhos pode ser enriquecida, acredito, distinguindo três modalidades do trabalho da memória cujo compartilhamento não possui o mesmo grau de plausibilidade: a protomemória, a memória e a metamemória (CANDAU, 2011).…”

The Neurohumanities: An Emerging Partnership for Exploring the Human Experience

“…The concept of schematic knowledge has recently begun to be investigated via the use of tools and approaches of cognitive and systems neuroscience, yielding several highly interesting insights. Higher-level schema, including those associated with cultural memories, appear to involve subregions of the prefrontal cortex (Gagnepain et al, 2020;Gilboa and Marlatte, 2017). In support of this view, fMRI signals in these regions report schema activation, and localized lesions in these regions, while impairing schematic generalization, also remarkably improve accurate recall of detail (Gilboa and Marlatte, 2017).…”

Decoding individual identity from brain activity elicited in imagining common experiences

“…In addition, our searchlight analyses identified clusters in: (1) Ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which has recently been found to encode the identity of known people, places and whether they were liked when fictitious meetings are imagined 7 , and more generally is thought to play a role in encoding self-reference 78 , emotional information 79 , and remote (years-old) episodic memories 13,15 . (2) Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with inferring traits of other people 78 , and has recently been shown to encode collective memories reflecting sociocultural group membership 24 . (3) The anterior temporal lobe, which is thought to be a key semantic memory hub 80 .…”

“…This core episodic recollection and simulation network includes regions of medial parietal cortex, inferior parietal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and medial and lateral temporal lobe [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] . Researchers seeking to decipher what information is represented in brain activity within regions of this network have shown that different types of event can be distinguished from multiple network regions [14][15][16][17] , as well different components of individual events [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] (e.g., people, places, objects, space/time of occurrence). However, it has remained unclear whether differences in activation patterns between individuals imagining similar types of event represent anything more than functionally-irrelevant between-subject noise.…”