RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 The hippocampus generalizes across memories that share item and context information JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 049965 DO 10.1101/049965 A1 Laura A. Libby A1 J. Daniel Ragland A1 Charan Ranganath YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/22/049965.abstract AB Episodic memory is known to rely on the hippocampus, but how the hippocampus organizes different episodes to permit their subsequent retrieval remains controversial. According to one view, hippocampal coding differentiates between similar events to reduce interference, whereas an alternative view is that the hippocampus assigns similar representations to events that share item and context information. Here, we used multivariate analyses of activity patterns measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize how the hippocampus distinguishes between memories based on similarity of their item and/or context information. Hippocampal activity patterns discriminated between events that shared either item or context information, but generalized across events that shared similar item-context associations. The current findings provide novel evidence that, whereas the hippocampus can resist mnemonic interference by separating events that generalize along a single attribute dimension, overlapping hippocampal codes may support memory for events with overlapping item-context relations.