Schedule of Events | Symposia

Memory content shapes event-specific representations in the default mode network

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

Nina Curko¹ (curko@bc.edu), Rosalie Samide¹, Valentina Krenz¹, Elizabeth A. Kensinger¹, Maureen Ritchey¹; ¹Boston College

Successful memory retrieval has been associated with the representational stability of event-specific activity patterns during recall. However, it is unclear whether representational stability is tied to specific kinds of memory details. For example, stable recall patterns may be associated with broader narrative details about an event by providing a consistent conceptual or affective frame. Alternatively, stable recall patterns could reflect a more faithful recapitulation of the perceptual details of an event. We examined representational stability within the default mode network (DMN), a set of regions commonly implicated in representing events during recall. The present study used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to ask whether the stability of a memory representation in the DMN reflects the persistence of event details in memory, in particular narrative, perceptual, or emotional information. Participants first viewed positive, negative, and neutral news clips, then brain activity was recorded while participants covertly recalled the videos three times in response to word cues. One day later, participants wrote memory descriptions for each video, and content was categorized into narrative and perceptual details. RSA was used to compute each event’s representational stability across the three retrieval rounds. Greater representational stability across repeated recalls was associated with the emotional valence of recall in more dorsal DMN areas, while stability in ventral DMN areas was associated with perceptual recall. These findings suggest that representational stability in the DMN depends on the content being recalled, with differential recruitment of DMN regions based on the type of information retrieved.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic