Schedule of Events | Symposia

Reinstatement of personal semantics during episodic recollection

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

D. Merika W. Sanders¹ (merikasanders@fas.harvard.edu), Preston P. Thakral^1,2, Daniel L. Schacter¹; ¹Harvard University, ²Smith College

In recent years, the stark distinction between episodic and semantic memory has blurred. Evidence not only suggests that these forms of memory share neural correlates, but, according to the semantic scaffolding hypothesis (e.g., Irish & Piguet, 2013), conceptual knowledge stored in semantic memory may also provide a framework to facilitate recollection of past events. Moreover, there exist understudied memory phenomena that exhibit characteristics of both memory types. Personal semantics (i.e., knowledge about one’s life), although highly personal like episodic memory, also resembles semantic memory in that it is independent of any specific spatio-temporal context. Here we employed fMRI to investigate whether, like semantic memory, personal semantics supports episodic recollection by providing knowledge of personally familiar people and places. Participants recalled past autobiographical events, each comprised of a location and person detail, and generated facts about either the location or person featured in those memories. Participants then provided a measure of their subjective experience during each task via a detailedness rating. A multivoxel pattern similarity analysis revealed that both hippocampus and left middle temporal gyrus/anterior temporal lobe supported reinstatement of detail-specific personal semantic information during episodic recollection. Moreover, in both regions this reinstatement effect was modulated by the subjective experience of recollected details. Our data provide evidence that mechanisms underlying semantic scaffolding may extend to personal semantic memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic