Schedule of Events | Symposia

The Salience / Parietal Memory Network Responds to Salient Transients Even When They Are New Items in an Old-New Recognition Test

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Xiangyu Wei¹ (xiangyu_wei@g.harvard.edu), Randy Buckner^1,2,3; ¹Harvard University, ²Massachusetts General Hospital, ³Harvard Medical School

The Salience / Parietal Memory Network (SAL/PMN) is a network that has been explored through two distinct functional perspectives. Studies on the Salience Network (SAL) anchored on dorsal anterior cingulate and anterior insula, focusing on transient responses to salient, relevant stimuli (Seeley, 2019). Research on the Parietal Memory Network (PMN) focused on posterior midline regions and mid-cingulate cortex, noting responses to familiar items in old-new recognition tasks (Gilmore et al., 2015). Within-individual precision neuroimaging demonstrated these regions likely forms a single distributed network, raising questions about the relationship between saliency detection and old-new recognition processes (Du et al., 2024). To explore this, we examined the network across multiple conditions in 6 intensively scanned individuals. The SAL/PMN network was activated in an oddball paradigm (detecting an infrequent red “K”) and by old words in an old-new recognition task, reproducing both effects in the two historical lineages. In a critical oppositional contrast, old-new recognition was tested with old items as rare (10%) targets versus new items as rare targets. The full extent of SAL/PMN was activated during target detection even when those targets were new items, consistent with a response to target saliency not their mnemonic history. These findings suggest SAL/PMN responds to salient, transient events. The finding that the network can show differential responses in old-new recognition paradigms likely reflects that such decisions are asymmetrical, and the old items are treated as the targets by the participant, as the effect can be reversed by changing the relevance of the new items.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other