Schedule of Events | Symposia

Changes in hippocampal connectivity after category learning predict recognition and generalization performance

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Kyla Brannigan¹ (kylabran@uoregon.edu), Lea Frank¹, Dagmar Zeithamova¹; ¹University of Oregon

The hippocampus is a key contributor to our ability to remember both specific experiences and extract common information from these experiences to generate new knowledge. Hippocampus is thought to support each of these processes through interactions with distinct cortical regions, but specificity and generalization are typically studied using distinct tasks and stimuli. Here we investigate whether hippocampal connectivity changes as a function of category learning, and whether these changes can separately track individual differences in recognition and generalization based on the same experiences. Participants underwent two fMRI scans while passively viewing face stimuli. Between the scans they learned to sort faces into categories. After scanning, they were tested both on their recognition of the training faces as well as their ability to generalize the previously learned categories onto new faces. We found that changes in background hippocampal connectivity from pre- to post-category learning were differentially predictive of performance on later measures of recognition and category generalization abilities. Hippocampal connectivity with lateral occipital and salience network regions predicted recognition ability while connectivity with sensorimotor network regions predicted categorization ability. These results demonstrate how hippocampal interactions with distinct regions support separate aspects of our memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic