The Hippocampal Horizon: Constructing and Segmenting Experience for Episodic Memory

Ross, Tatjana; Easton, Alexander

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.11.038

Cited by 23 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 409 publications

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“…This is supported by previous ndings in other OPC tasks in a continual trials apparatus 24 and in one trial a day testing 30,38,39 . We postulate that delaying the onset of the tone enhanced the salience of the contextual cues 18,19 , likely recruiting associative mnemonic hippocampal processing [40][41][42][43][44] , as good episodic recognition performance in the OPC task has been seen to be dependent on the hippocampus 38 and fornix 30 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Rats use strategies to make object choices in spontaneous object recognition tasks

Ross

Easton

2022

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Rodent spontaneous object recognition (SOR) paradigms are widely used to study the mechanisms of complex memory in many laboratories. Due to the absence of explicit reinforcement in these tasks, there is an underlying assumption that object exploratory behaviour is ‘spontaneous’. However, rodents can strategise, readily adapting their behaviour depending on the current information available and prior predications formed from learning and memory. Here, using the object-place-context (episodic-like) recognition task and novel analytic methods relying on multiple trials within a single session, we demonstrate that rats use a context-based or recency-based object recognition strategy for the same types of trials, depending on task conditions. Salient and predictable conditions led to animals exploring objects on the basis of episodic novelty reliant on contextual information. However, exposure to occasional ambiguous conditions changed animals’ responses towards a recency-based preference. The results have important implications for future research using SOR tasks, especially in the way experimenters design, analyse and interpret object recognition experiments in non-human animals.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Rats use strategies to make object choices in spontaneous object recognition tasks

Ross

Easton

2022

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“…At a shorter timescale, it has been found that regular exposure to a rich environment in the videogame Minecraft led to improvements in behavioural pattern separation, such that participants that were allowed to explore and create more complex and expansive environments were better able to distinguish between old items and highly similar lures in a separate memory task 28 . While these studies do not provide evidence for a link between experiential diversity and event perception specifically, they nonetheless indicate that day-to-day variation in our experiences (such as large social networks and complex spatial environment) exerts a strong influence on the ability to form rich and distinct mnemonic representations, which may feasibly arise via key memory encoding mechanisms such as event segmentation 2 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…This ability to carve experience into distinct chunks is thought to depend on the detection of event boundaries. Event segmentation theory proposes that these boundaries emerge from a prediction error signal elicited by shifts in either situational features (e.g., spatial location, people present) or internal states (e.g., arousal, goals) 1,2 . Once an error threshold is met, these boundaries trigger the generation of a new event model (a structured representation of an event within a specific spatiotemporal context) and the encoding of the previous event model into long-term memory 3,4 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is perhaps unsurprising given that large individual differences in the granularity and detail of personal event memories are also readily seen, even within younger samples 16,17 . Given its intrinsic link to changes in the external world 2,4 , a pertinent question is how event segmentation ability may be influenced directly by variability in day-to-day experiences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The association between real-world experiential diversity and event cognition

Hodgetts

Postans

Williams

2022

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The ability to effectively parse our experience into meaningful events is thought to be critical for structuring episodic memory, engaging in daily activities, and navigating the social and spatial environment. Despite this, little is known about how inter-individual variation in this ability emerges. Within a sample of 159 young adults, we found that the degree to which individuals were exposed to a diverse range of social and spatial experiences (experiential diversity) was significantly related to event segmentation, such that individuals with greater daily variation in their social and spatial lives produced more fine-grained event segmentations during a movie-viewing task. Moreover, this effect remained when controlling for potential confounds, such as anxiety and loneliness. These results provide new insights into how real-world experiences may shape key memory encoding mechanisms, providing a potential cognitive pathway through which social disconnectedness impacts cognitive health and wellbeing.

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“…Because far more information is generated than any organism can perceive and process, organisms have evolved to perceive and process the information that they need to survive. Humans and some other animals do so by segmenting information, that is, by a cognitive process that divides it into chunks with a beginning and an end (Baldwin and Kosie, 2021 ; Ross and Easton, 2022 ).…”

Section: What Is An Event?mentioning

confidence: 99%