Schedule of Events | Symposia

The roles of event content and recall specificity in shaping representations of naturalistic narratives

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

Angelique Delarazan¹ (a.delarazan@wustl.edu), Tej Bhoga¹, Katherine March¹, Zachariah Reagh¹; ¹Washington University in St. Louis

Episodic memory plays a fundamental role in cognition, allowing us to convert a continuous influx of information into representations we can learn and later retrieve. The multifaceted nature of memory representations poses a challenge for disentangling the neural processes that support them. For instance, remembering one’s own tenth birthday may consist of retrieving the individual entities of the event such as the people and objects involved, as well as contexts including the place and situations that have unfolded. One could also retain and represent these memories at varying levels of specificity, including a gist-level summary the event, or a highly specific detailed-level account, incorporating rich and vivid details about the event. Here, we aimed to examine how different neural representations of specificity (gist versus detailed memories) and content (people versus locations) may interact with one another. Twenty-eight participants were introduced to eight distinct short narrative events. Two central characters and two locations were combined such that one narrative involved one central character and one location. Participants were then cued to verbally recall the characters, locations, and events at a gist- or detailed-level immediately and after a two-week delay. Ongoing representational similarity analyses will assess the functional organization of cortico-hippocampal networks in supporting event memory representations of specificity and content. Additional analyses will investigate how these representations change over the course of encoding, retrieval, and re-retrieval after a delay. Together, results will clarify the way individual components of complex events are processed and remembered at different levels of specificity.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic